San Francisco, California, United States
I build and scale technical organizations that turn frontier artificial intelligence, infrastructure, and complex systems into production products. I am currently VP of Engineering at Twelve Labs, a multimodal AI company building foundation models and developer platforms for video understanding. Previously, I was a founding engineer and VP of Engineering at Phaidra, where I helped build the company from inception into a production artificial intelligence company serving mission-critical industrial systems. My operating range spans company-level technology strategy, organizational design, product and engineering planning, hiring and leadership development, architecture, foundation model development & inference and large-scale distributed systems. Earlier in my career, I was one of the founding engineers at AWS IoT, where I helped design and build the core components responsible for supporting billions of connected devices and millions of transactions per second. I also founded and ran two startups in the consumer tech space.
Twelve Labs builds multimodal foundation models and developer platforms for video understanding, including semantic multimodal & hybrid search, video summarization, and video-to-text interaction. As VP of Engineering, I lead engineering across machine learning, product, AI inference, infrastructure, and security, partnering closely with cross-functional partners and executive leadership to bring frontier models and multimodal search capabilities into reliable enterprise-grade products. Focus areas: * Scaling engineering execution across multimodal foundation model inference, video data ingestion & processing, AI-enabled video native products, APIs/SDKs, infrastructure, security, and enterprise deployments. * Building operating mechanisms for planning, execution, operational excellence, incident reviews, and cross-functional alignment. * Developing engineering leaders, improving talent density, and raising the bar for execution quality. * Supporting enterprise and public-sector customer requirements, including reliability, security, on-prem and restricted deployment models, and production readiness.
* Built and led a global engineering organization across Applied AI, Data & AI Platforms, ML Infrastructure, Applications, API, DevOps/SRE, and Technical Program Management. * Managed engineering strategy, roadmap, OKRs, budgeting, organizational design, hiring, performance management, and leadership development. * Served as a core member of the company leadership team, contributing to company strategy, culture and execution planning. * Partnered with Product, Research, Customer Success, and Go-to-Market leaders to convert advanced AI research into production customer value. * Built operating mechanisms for monthly and quarterly planning, program reviews, operational health reviews, staff meetings, engineering all-hands, and cross-functional execution. * Coached and developed leaders, including engineering directors, managers, tech leads and staff engineers. * Drove engineering standards across distributed systems, infrastructure, machine learning, developer experience, reliability, and production operations.
Joined Phaidra at inception as founding engineer and Head of Engineering. Built the first engineering team, core architecture, and production platform for autonomous AI agents operating mission-critical industrial systems in real-time. * Designed and built the initial architecture across data ingestion, time-series pipelines, agent training, inference, observability, orchestration, and customer deployment. * Led the engineering push from prototype to live customer deployments, including incident response, war rooms, reliability hardening, and production operations. * Made foundational build-versus-buy decisions across cloud infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure, observability, CI/CD, and developer tooling. * Established software engineering standards, infrastructure practices, testing systems, and operational discipline as the company scaled beyond early-stage execution.
Founded and operated two consumer and marketplace startups across real estate technology and e-commerce. Built products, teams, technology platforms, and early go-to-market motions from zero to launch. * Founded and led Instant Home, an online-to-offline real estate technology platform for the Indian market, spanning consumer search, agent/seller/landlord workflows, 3D walkthroughs & inspections and pricing intelligence. * Founded and led an e-commerce and logistics startup with a personalized discovery and circular-economy model. * Built and managed cross-functional teams across software engineering, product management, machine learning, design, growth, operations, and domain experts. * Owned technology architecture, product strategy, hiring, roadmap, go-to-market experimentation, and operational execution. * Built backend systems for marketplace workflows, inventory/logistics complexity, pricing intelligence, customer dashboards, and partner integrations.
Founding engineer on AWS IoT Core. Helped design and build critical components of the Message Broker and Device Gateway, including high-throughput publish/subscribe infrastructure, subscription storage, partitioning, recovery, anti-entropy, fanout, and connection-state systems. * Built distributed systems infrastructure designed for billions of connected devices and millions of transactions per second. * Designed strongly consistent storage and retrieval systems for topic subscriptions over a virtually unbounded topic namespace. * Built partitioning, snapshot, recovery, anti-entropy, and fanout mechanisms for high-scale message delivery. * Helped take AWS IoT from early development through launch and scale.
Built distributed workflow systems and developer frameworks for AWS Simple Workflow Service. * Designed and built Workflow Templates, a domain-specific language-based workflow language and execution engine that preceded AWS Step Functions-style visual workflow orchestration. * Owned and maintained AWS Flow Frameworks for Java and Ruby. * Contributed to service stability, scalability, and developer experience for the service.
Amazon.com, IBM, Dassault Systèmes Built early-career experience across distributed systems, enterprise security, analytics, and software engineering. * Developed scalable analytics systems at AWS. * Worked on WebSphere Application Server Security at IBM. * Contributed to engineering software development at Dassault Systèmes.