Experience

17 years shipping web software. I lead teams and still write the code — project planning, product, UX, architecture, AWS and infra, and the code itself.

How I lead

  • Lead by doing — in the repo, in the tier-3 queue, in the system with the team
  • Link arms instead of pointing: shoulder to shoulder beats over the shoulder
  • Alignment is the real engineering problem — get everyone holding the same picture
  • Serve first: clear blockers, argue for resources, absorb the organizational noise
  • Make it safe to say the hard thing, and go first on being wrong
  • Bring humor and energy on purpose — a team having a good time moves faster
  • Grow the people: interview loops, mentoring into promotions, career conversations

Senior Engineering Group Manager (Squad Leader) — Extensiv

Aug 2021 – Present

Lead the Shipping squad across three stacks while staying deep in the code. Architect the serverless shipping platform behind hundreds of thousands of labels/day and 1M+ API requests/day across 100+ carrier integrations. Brought the team into the AI era with deliberate guardrails and hands-on coaching.

CTO (Contract) — GO BEYOND

Nov 2022 – May 2024

Led software architecture for an automated street-corner grocery kiosk. Architecture and POCs; venture ended when funding fell through.

Senior Software Engineer — Solutionreach

Oct 2018 – Aug 2021

Owned the UI platform layer company-wide. Made the case for Mithril → Vue against leadership preference, then led the migration. Canary deploy tooling with infra.

Operations / Engineering Generalist — Jixiti

Feb 2010 – Oct 2018

Startup generalist: frontend, MySQL/PHP, data warehousing, AWS, releases, and customer-facing range.

Eras

Browser wars → SPA platforms → Serverless at scale → Squad leadership and the AI shift. Managing while building, and getting a team genuinely fluent with AI tooling rather than mandating it.