Greater Tampa Bay Area
At Kukun, we are creating innovative property and finance technology. Our systems process gigabytes of government, real estate, and homeowner data through AI models, and then craft the resulting insights into scalable APIs for our partners and our own websites and apps. We use technologies like containerized microservices, parallel data processing engines, distributed file systems, and modern web and native app development frameworks. Our mission is to transform home ownership, providing the knowledge and tools each homeowner needs to profitably invest in and maintain their home while generating wealth. Our data and analytics products also serve leading companies in the investment, real estate, construction, and banking industries. If you are interested in any of these areas, I'd love to talk.
As VP of Engineering for a property tech startup reporting to the CEO, I steer technical strategy and lead development teams to deliver B2B and B2C products that provide homeowners and investors with AI-driven insights for profitable financial decisions. Responsibilities & Accomplishments: • Shaped technology strategy and system architecture, modernized LAMP stack to React and Next.js, created scalable data platform using BigQuery and Airflow, and drove AWS-to-Google Cloud migration, saving one year of infrastructure costs • Modernized engineering practices: led adoption of AI-assisted development with Github Copilot, Claude Sonnet, and Grok Code; championed DevOps culture to optimize cloud infrastructure and reduce spend by 74%; instituted a test automation strategy; adopted Terraform for infrastructure-as-code; established data-driven monitoring; and automated web traffic management • Built “Kukun Homes: AI for House Hunters” iPhone app as lead developer, architect, and product manager, from concept to 1.0 release. Integrated SwiftUI, Core Data & Google Gemini 2.5 AI • Spearheaded generative AI integration into new and existing products for property and permit analysis; developed proofs-of-concept using LLaMA for text analysis and Gemini for images • Collaborated with COO and VP of Data Science to align product and data science strategies with technical vision, took ownership of machine learning pipelines using XGBoost and regression models, ensuring seamless integration and execution of strategic initiatives
Led the vision and delivery of the travel industry’s leading commerce tax platform, overseeing the development of multi-tenant services that scale to manage millions of requests per second while ensuring compliance with global tax regulations. This platform supports the entire transaction lifecycle–from shopping and booking to invoicing, accounting, filing, and reporting. Responsibilities & Accomplishments: • Led a team of 70 software engineers, program managers, and directors • Collaborated with key stakeholders including the SVP of Tax, CFO of Expedia Services, and VPs of engineering and product, to design an architecture and roadmap maximizing ROI and advancing our strategy to establish a foundational platform for the travel industry • Fostered innovation and alignment with enterprise architecture principles, driving technology adoption such as extensible multi-tenant APIs, data streams, real-time compute, and data lakes. Leveraged a scalable foundation of Apache Spark, Kubernetes, Kafka, gRPC, OpenAPI & CI/CD
Led the business intelligence and data warehouse engineering organization for the Hotwire brand, and later the Booking Data Engineering group, stewards of all of Expedia's sales data. Built the systems that transform events into actionable intelligence, including core booking data and financial reporting. Responsibilities & Accomplishments: • Responsible for global team of 35 engineers, software architects, and engineering managers with team members in Bellevue, San Francisco, Guadalajara, and Delhi • Oversaw the enterprise transformation from classic Oracle batch ETL processing to a scalable streaming data stack, integrating technologies including Kafka, Spark, EMR, Hive, and Presto • Transformed a classic BI and data warehouse development organization to an agile development group building a real-time data platform in AWS. Our tech stack includes Apache Spark, AWS Lambda, ECS, Kinesis, Firehose, and Aurora, as well as a legacy Teradata platform • Managed development of the Fulfillment Management System, a transactional service responsible for Expedia’s supplier purchase order for every customer booking. Built with a cloud-native microservice architecture using ECS, DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Elasticsearch
Set the strategic direction and managed the backlog for both our API management and lodging analytics data platforms, including competitive intelligence, hotel property, and inventory analysis capabilities. Responsibilities & Accomplishments: • Trusted by global community of analysts and executives to direct our lodging data platform • Conceived of and led a large investment to transition to self-service and real-time streaming data platforms. Based on streaming data ingestion through APIs with a Hadoop/HBase backend, this was a bold departure from our legacy systems, enabling timely and comprehensive analytics • Built business case, led requirements elicitation, and organized vendor evaluation for a seven-figure investment in an API management platform, now a core part of Expedia’s technology stack • Provided monthly in-person updates to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and chief product officer on product status; hosted semiannual full-day planning meetings for diverse stakeholder set including organization VPs, analytics, and engineering directors; while maintaining ongoing collaboration with user communities in Geneva, London, Brisbane, and Bellevue
I split time between the senior-level Computer Architecture course, and the freshman-level Intro to Computing Systems (which includes everything from transistors to basic C programming). The most personally rewarding parts were mentoring small groups on their final computer architecture project (designing a full microprocessor, culminating in a performance competition), and giving guest lectures to over 100 students. I served as head TA, amongst a group of 10, for my final 2 semesters.
I created software tools for the architecture group of a start-up designing highly-parallel physics processors which accelerate physics calculations for games. The company was eventually bought by Nvidia. During the summer of my internship, our prototype units included the capability to generate a trace of every machine instruction executed by the processor while running our physics software. I built a C++ program to analyze these traces , which I used to create detailed analyses of processor utilization and potential performance benefits of proposed architectural modifications. This allowed us to identify the improvements which would have the biggest impact in future versions of our hardware.