United States
I build platforms, guardrails, and engineering cultures that let organizations ship faster at higher quality. My thesis: the highest-leverage engineering skill is no longer writing code — it's writing the specifications, paved roads, and agentic workflows that let AI agents execute against them. Invest in the rails, not the train. For 15+ years I've built those rails at some of the highest-scale consumer platforms in tech — PayPal, eBay, and now Rocket — with one consistent through-line: turning fragmented systems and teams into composable platforms that accelerate everyone around them. At Rocket, I'm driving three transformations in parallel as a Distinguished Engineer: • Building our AI-native development platform — the reusable agent skills and agentic workflows (paved roads) teams build on, plus the guardrail framework that governs what agents do autonomously and what stays human-reviewed. • Unifying the API platform through federated GraphQL — one composable graph powering Rocket.com's web, mobile, and AI experiences. • Integrating Mr. Cooper, America's largest mortgage servicer, into Rocket's technology stack following the acquisition. Before Rocket, as a Distinguished Engineer at eBay, I led architecture for consumer-facing Web and Mobile platforms across Payments, Identity, and Risk — including the architecture and technical strategy for eBay Live, eBay's real-time video-commerce platform — drove tens of millions in incremental GMV through web-performance work, and scaled CI/CD coverage from 55% to 95% across 300+ applications. At PayPal, I built and led the SDKs team, brought GraphQL to PayPal and Venmo, was lead engineer for PayPal Checkout, turned around the Web Platform org into the foundation other teams built on, and served as a founding board member of the GraphQL Foundation. I care deeply about engineering culture — mentoring senior ICs, running interview processes as a bar raiser, and building communities where engineers thrive. The best platform work isn't only technical; it's creating the conditions where great engineers do their best work.
I lead technical strategy and hands-on architecture across Rocket's Product Engineering organization, driving three transformations in parallel. AI-native development platform. I'm building the platform primitives Rocket's AI-native engineering runs on — a company-wide agent skills marketplace (a shared, contributable library the whole company builds on) and a library of reusable agentic workflows that standardize how teams apply agents to engineering work. I designed the evaluation and guardrail framework that governs what agents can do autonomously and what stays human-reviewed. As technical lead for the team building our autonomous development pipeline, I guide the architecture for agents that pick up work, open PRs, resolve CI failures, and respond to review feedback — in early rollout across Product Engineering. Unified API platform. I architected a federated GraphQL platform on Apollo Federation that consolidates dozens of backend services into a single composable graph — the unified API layer powering Rocket.com's web, mobile, and AI chatbot experiences. I designed the facade so product surfaces integrate once and underlying services can be swapped beneath them without re-integrating every consumer. Mr. Cooper integration. I led the engineering effort to integrate Mr. Cooper into Rocket's technology stack following the acquisition — merging core mortgage and identity systems and onboarding clients — which the federated graph let us do underneath product teams without disrupting them. I also built shared platform libraries (lifecycle, resiliency, health checks, observability), drove org-wide code-quality and security-scanning standards, and designed Rocket's Principal+ Engineer interview process and launched an AI Lunch & Learn series.
I led architecture for eBay's consumer-facing Web and Mobile platforms, driving innovation across Payments, Identity, and Risk in an organization of 800+ engineers. I led the architecture and technical strategy for eBay Live — eBay's real-time video-commerce and auction platform — integrating live streaming, interactive bidding, and a mobile-first experience, and partnered across product, design, and marketing to bring a new livestream-shopping format to market. I drove tens of millions in incremental GMV by leading web-performance optimization across flagship products — cutting TTFB, LCP, FCP, and FID by 50–60% and materially improving checkout and browsing. I scaled CI/CD automation across 300+ Node.js applications, lifting automated-deployment coverage from 55% to 95% in a year. And I chaired eBay's Web Virtual Architecture Team (VAT), setting reusable architecture patterns and standards and authoring and reviewing ADRs that improved testing, release tooling, and platform standards across eBay's global teams.
I built and led a new developer-platform organization responsible for PayPal's SDKs — the layer that lets millions of merchants integrate payments into their web and mobile applications — and unified SDK strategy across PayPal, Braintree, and Hyperwallet, focusing on performance, scalability, and ease of integration for external developers. I partnered with senior leaders to set strategic product direction and align technical solutions with PayPal's business goals.
In 2019 I took on PayPal's Web Platform organization — the frameworks, infrastructure, and tools used by 350+ applications and 800+ Web and Node.js developers across the company. Before I joined, I was the team's biggest critic and biggest supporter at once: a lot of what we'd tried to do in Checkout was limited by the platform. The team had lost touch with its customers, and leadership was questioning whether to keep investing in it at all. I took the opportunity to turn it around. I injected a customer-first mentality, hired talented engineers from across the company, set strategic direction, and pitched the vision to the CTO and his staff. We grew the team roughly 2x and rebuilt the platform into the reference implementation other PayPal teams built on — shipping capabilities our customers had wanted for years (UI component discovery and sharing, GraphQL infrastructure and tooling, overhauled developer documentation, and a complete SDLC for CDN deployments) and growing a contributor community that fed improvements back into the platform. We re-established trust with our customers, formed new partnerships, and helped PayPal reclaim its position as a top destination for Web and JavaScript engineers.
As Principal Engineer in Checkout, I owned the technical direction of a web platform tens of millions of people used daily. We were never satisfied with how our UIs fetched data — we went from an orchestration REST API, to small atomic REST APIs, to a Batch REST framework, and finally to GraphQL in 2018, and never looked back. I wrote about it in "GraphQL: A Success Story for PayPal Checkout." My role then expanded to bringing GraphQL to the rest of PayPal. I met with product and technology leaders across PayPal, Venmo, and Braintree — many were REST veterans skeptical of the shift — and learned to describe GraphQL in terms each audience understood. I created GraphQL training that hundreds of engineers attended, became PayPal's external spokesperson for GraphQL, spoke at meetups and on podcasts, and served as a founding board member of the GraphQL Foundation. I later wrote "Scaling GraphQL at PayPal." I also helped design and architect "Checkout Lite," which still serves PayPal Web Checkout today — bringing significant performance and revenue gains and letting teams provision, build, and deploy in minutes, not hours.
Our stealth startup re-imagined the way that people discover and experience TV and video content. Before Google Chromecast and Amazon Firestick were invented, we built a device that pairs with your phone and tablet and allows you to explore and send content to your TV. At Qplay, I was the first UI engineer, so I built the app from the ground up. It was a hybrid mobile app built on top of Apache Cordova (Phonegap). Over 10 months, we grew the UI team to 4 engineers. It was an interesting project, to say the least. Not your typical web app. It controlled your TV! I really had to flex the web to its limits to be as "native"-like as possible. Lots of hardware-accelerated CSS, caching, and high-performant JavaScript. Qplay was founded in August 2012 and initially funded by Redpoint Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. https://www.eeworldonline.com/tivo-founders-try-to-reprogram-internet-video-with-qplay/
As a senior UI engineer, I was on the initial tiger team that brought Node.js and modern web technologies to PayPal, rebooting Checkout — PayPal's flagship product — using LeanUX, rapid prototyping, and user research. Many of those UI patterns are still in use today. I also contributed to PayPal's first unified JavaScript SDK, CI/CD in the UI stack, and UI engineering standards.