15+ years building high-stakes backend systems across fintech, commerce, and real-time platforms: from software managing trillions in assets to production ML whose results were highlighted on an earnings call.
The constant across all of it: improving the quality of life and efficiency of the people around me.
Architecture matters when it changes what an organization can ship, operate, or afford. These examples come from paid engineering roles.
Machine learning was the exclusive domain of the data science team. I led the first non-data-science team to ship a production ML application with a full MLOps pipeline; it was highlighted to investors on an earnings call, and the ML training I ran made that path repeatable for other backend teams.
Deployments took days, sometimes more than a week. I built and presented the CI/CD platform the bank adopted, then trained teams on how to build on it. Company-wide deployments moved from days to minutes on a system used by hundreds of engineers.
Tax-lookup effort multiplied with each acquisition, heading toward a failure state estimated at $15 million a week in revenue. I won buy-in for a rebuild, automated the human-heavy steps, and extracted cached, horizontally scalable microservices that a small junior team ran smoothly at thousands of queries per second.
Server-side development kept multiplayer games out of reach for most studios. I designed and built an event-stream engine with routing and filtering while leading a 20-person team; it cut server and development costs by 90% per game, saving client studios hundreds of thousands of dollars per title annually.
Black Skies is a persistent multiplayer space game designed for 10,000-player battles with no time dilation. The game is the setting; the engineering questions are general: bounded consistency, ownership and fencing, failure recovery, delivery fanout, benchmark design, and explicit falsifiers. The series separates what is implemented, what is measured, and what is still a hypothesis.
CogniCluster is my current independent engineering lab. PlotWarden is the durable orchestration system; Black Skies is the distributed-systems proving ground and product it helps build. PlotWarden is a working prototype with a published specification and kill condition.
Available for full-time Principal and Staff-equivalent engineering roles in distributed systems, platform engineering, production ML, and AI infrastructure. Boston area or remote.