Brooklyn, New York, United States
I provide technical leadership to companies needing pragmatic solutions to complex problems. I’ve been an individual contributor and a manager. I seek out challenges and learn new things quickly. I've been programming for 25+ years in multiple languages, picking up new ones as needed. I’ve been a leader in open source for 15+ years and give talks at Meetups and conferences. Prior to focusing on software engineering, I was a management consultant for 16 years.
• Drove 2.6x growth in customer data under management over 20 months, including 18% YoY growth in customer organizations and a data ingestion rate exceeding 6 PB/year. Produced the first product-level P&L decomposition to inform strategic investment decisions. • Expanded Atlas Data Federation and Online Archive from AWS-only to GA on Azure and GCP, unlocking new customer segments across all three major cloud providers. • Launched next-generation archival architecture program to deliver single tenancy, customer-managed encryption at rest, and increased throughput: secured cross-organizational architectural buy-in across four engineering divisions; first end-to-end data movement milestones delivered ahead of schedule. • Achieved $2.6M+ in annual operating expense reductions through infrastructure optimizations across compute, storage, and monitoring layers. • Overhauled on-call and incident response: expanded rotations to improve coverage and sustainability, enabling the team to deliver 15+ roadmap epics alongside operational work. Shipped modernized Admin UI with fine-grained access controls, enabling TSE self-service and reducing on-call engineering load. • Rebuilt and scaled the organization: completed six hires including two Staff engineers; realigned into two chartered sub-teams (User Experience and Storage Systems); achieved 50/50 gender representation. Instituted continuous calibration and structured feedback as part of every 1:1 across the org; coached leads on addressing underperformance. Employee engagement scores rose from 58% to 88% over 20 months.
• DRI for Atlas Online Archive transformation initiative: Led cross-functional effort spanning 6 teams across organization; architected petabyte-scale system redesign achieving 60x query performance improvement; designed and executed novel four-phase zero-downtime migration strategy using transparent query federation; system handles 40% YoY growth; patent pending for novel architectural approach. • Strategic technical leadership: Contributed to development of R&D tenets for CTO organization; shaped product and technical roadmaps; authored technical proposals for strategic initiatives including customer-managed encryption. • Transformed operational excellence: Advocated for 3x improvement in release velocity; established new standards for postmortem analysis; implemented operational maturity metrics and SLOs across multiple teams. • Pioneered economic-driven engineering practices: Developed and championed product cost modeling frameworks leading to $1M+ annual cost reduction; approach adopted for strategic decision-making across product development lifecycle. • Established durability threat modeling methodology: Created and implemented systematic approach to identify and mitigate data loss risks; framework adopted by multiple teams across organization; mentored teams on implementation. • Technical leadership and mentorship: Established and ran weekly office hours program reaching dozens of engineers; mentored senior engineers through staff-level career transitions; served as acting team lead during leadership transitions.
• Email productivity startup • Developed web front-end, MongoDB schemas, business logic and email back-end • Automated deployment and configuration management
• Co-founded the Strategic IT and Operations practice; grew practice to 8 partners, 30+ consultants and $45+ million annual revenue • Developed a unique, proprietary approach to data-warehouse-driven retail pricing • Areas of expertise include: business-technology alignment, agile development, process re-engineering, requirements analysis, data analysis, statistical analysis, simulation, data visualization, financial services strategy, information strategy