Background
Senior engineer who ships complete systems (payments, auth, search, fulfillment, real-time messaging) and leads the teams that build them. Twelve years across web and distributed vehicle telemetry; currently day-to-day technical lead of an eight-person team, holding merge authority and running production for a marketplace heading to public launch. Phoenix, AZ.
Experience
2025 – present · Software Engineer · ISSO (SyberJet Aircraft) and Alpine Landing (uCollect)
- Production
- Cut the card-labeler's initial load, the OCR workflow's entry point, from 20–25 seconds to ~1 second: traced it to un-indexed 570k-row category scans and redesigned the query.
- Leadership
- Day-to-day technical lead on a cross-functional team of eight: primary reviewer and merge authority across every workstream.
- AI and ML
- Built the platform's first LLM backend; stood up and operate the self-hosted vLLM GPU inference host; contribute to and maintain the multi-model card-recognition pipeline.
- Payments
- Built USDC stablecoin deposits and withdrawals on a Stripe Connect platform, and the offers and negotiation system.
- Security
- Designed and shipped passwordless login with passkeys and WebAuthn end to end, and step-up 2FA for sensitive actions.
- Fulfillment
- Designed and shipped the returns program end to end, and built the EasyPost shipping integration.
- Real-time
- Built the platform's chat from scratch over ActionCable.
- Avionics
- Built an in-cabin avionics display proof-of-concept in Flutter targeting NXP i.MX 8 embedded Linux.
2020 – 2025 · Nikola Motor
- Lead Engineer
- Owned technical direction for a team of 8–10 engineers. Ran outsourced penetration testing and closed every medium- and high-severity finding.
- Senior Engineer
- Drove unit test coverage from ~40% to 90% in three months. Built over-the-air firmware update orchestration end to end.
- Software Engineer
- Core contributor on a telematics platform that grew from zero to ~7.8M requests and ~2.4B rows of time-series data per day.
2011 – 2020 · Earlier
- Golden Mean Solutions
- Software Developer: greenfield EdTech and eCommerce web applications.
- American Red Cross
- Engineer III: the Angular.js UI component library behind redcross.org and redcrossblood.org.
- TeamSnap
- Software Developer: microservices on RabbitMQ, and APIs serving mobile and web clients.
- SmallBIT
- Contract IT and web, self-employed, concurrent with the roles above.
Military
- United States Navy
- Air Traffic Controller, AC2 (AW). Facility Rated Approach Controller.
Skills
Stack
- Primary
- Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, PostgreSQL, MySQL, JavaScript, Tailwind, REST API design, Git, Linux
- Strong
- Python, Go, Swift, Flutter, TimescaleDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kamal, Capistrano, GitHub Actions, AWS, Stripe, ActionCable
- AI and ML
- Multi-model OCR pipelines, LLM product features, agent orchestration, retrieval and memory, self-hosted GPU inference (vLLM on NVIDIA), local inference (MLX, Ollama), LLM eval harnesses
- Security
- Passkeys and WebAuthn, step-up 2FA, device fingerprinting, penetration-test remediation
- Practices
- Test strategy and coverage programs, flaky-test forensics, static analysis in CI, production incident response, stacked PR delivery, technical mentoring
Education
Degrees and training
- M.S. Software Engineering
- Regis University. 21 of 36 credit hours, 3.85 GPA.
- B.A. Political Science
- University of Colorado, 2013.
- Full-Stack Development
- Galvanize, 2014.
- Tower and Radar
- Control Tower Operator and Advanced Radar, Naval Aviation Technical Training Command.