Kirkland, Washington, United States
I build AI-native systems that transform how people work — at 200,000-employee scale and at startup speed. I lead engineering for Microsoft's Employee Experience organization, where I'm designing multi-agent architectures, personally writing some of the MVPs, building a domain-specific small language model, and shipping production eval suites now used by the M365 baseline platform to catch regressions in customer-facing agents. I'm also leading original innovation work on AI-Ready Data — solving how to prepare fragmented enterprise data for reliable AI consumption. I'm a context and spec engineer. I spend most of my time on architecture, design, and planning — then direct Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot to execute. It's a different discipline, and it's how small teams ship 10x what large ones can. I'm building a Full-Stack Builder Agent SDK on top of Anthropic's Agent SDK, the Microsoft Agents SDK, and Skills — wrapping safety guardrails, cost controls, and opinionated workflows so hundreds of engineers, PMs, and designers in my org can ship AI-native work safely and fast. I wrote the "Full-Stack Builder Model" paper that defines the approach, and every week I curate what's happening outside my default stack and ship it to my team. Microsoft sales teams bring me into monthly EBCs with Fortune 50 CHROs, Chief People Officers, and CIOs as the technical voice in the room when the conversation turns to AI and digital transformation. Three questions dominate: How do we make our data AI-ready? How do we deploy AI without nightmares? How do we replace end-to-end business processes — not just add a chatbot? These are the product requirements for the next enterprise AI vertical. Before Microsoft, I rode three exponential growth waves: ONI Systems (acquired by Ciena), Tableau (pre-IPO — I discovered and led the Hyper acquisition from TUM Munich, opened the Munich R&D office, interviewed by TechCrunch, Seattle Times, CMSWire, and InformationWeek), and Shopify (CTO senior leadership, 2017–2019). I built data platforms under real regulatory weight — GDPR and CCPA at Tableau and Shopify, SOX at Microsoft — without slowing the ship cycle. I've been forward-deployed at customers my entire career: Google, banks, retail, manufacturing, fintechs at Tableau; contract manufacturers at Cisco. Customer empathy isn't a checkbox for me. It's how I learn. 5 books with Microsoft Press. ACM SIGMOD, PDC, TechEd, ETH Zurich speaker. English and French (native bilingual). Dual US-Canadian citizen. Kirkland, WA.
Shipping impactful products via AI innovations for Employee Experiences, HR and CELA. Leading and developing Cloud-Based CLM and document lifecycle management SaaS product and contributing to SharePoint Premium, Legal Matters and Knowledge SaaS, Employee Self-Service Copilot with co-development of Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Platform, and Microsoft Copilot platforms, Viva Insights and Viva Insights Copilot, Customer Zero HR and CELA employee experiences, HR Application and Services (HR Core with SAP Success Factors Employee Central, Eightfold AI, Learning and Skills Experiences, AI driven personalized Employee Experiences, AI and HR Digital Transformations, HR and CELA AskHR - AskCELA with AI and ML, Talent Acquisition, Insights HR And Analytics, Time and Absence with Workforce Software), and Travel and Expense Copilot. Leading Microsoft Digital Data Council. Customer zero Fabric and Purview product feedback and collaboration. Building of the HR modern analytical ecosystem on Fabric and Purview as well as a domain agnostic data distribution platform with low-latency, bulk, API capabilities, Data Quality, running on Azure and Fabric in an efficient and cost effective manner. Building AI-Ready data products and shaping the pillars and data culture within MSD and the Microsoft COO organization.
Created the vision and first Tableau wide Enterprise Data Strategy to drive business value, better products and customer success. Enabling all analytics teams at Tableau to have a unified strategy for governance, data engineering, data science, BI, and help measuring impact for the business. Responsible for building and leading a team of 50+ (and growing) software engineers, data scientists, data engineers, and product managers in the R&D organization. My impact and my organization are directly attributed to $225M of revenues and $11m of cost reduction and efficiencies. We have also enabled making data-driven decisions with measurable outcomes using Product Usage Analytics and Intelligence. Created and executed on the vision and data strategy with a focus and accountabilities on: - Enterprise telemetry strategy and enablement in all our products - Improve Tableau’s Engineering culture with a DevOps mentality - Improve the Prod Dev Org and the BUs’ ability to make data-driven decisions using Product Usage and Product Intelligence including recommendations and attrition - Metrics, KPIs, data products evaluation and measurement with key indicators of business impact. - Enterprise data governance, privacy compliance, and self-service data warehouse and data platform - Data culture, data literacy, Tableau customer zero - Enabling all business units with modelling and data science best practices enabling the creation of new data products and insights - Impact of Tableau’s data strategy influencing/replacing/evolving key elements of the data strategy at Salesforce - M&A Integration - Tableau at Salesforce
Member of Shopify's Engineering Senior Leadership CTO team building and scaling engineering teams within high-growth tech environments. • Led global data engineering teams at Shopify to build secure, performant, and scalable data services and products. • Oversaw multidisciplinary teams focused on personalized content recommendations, AI/ML-driven discovery experiences, and search functionality. • Build internal - external data products, AI/ML Ready data, and Shopify data products for merchants. • Developed expertise in AI/ML technologies to deliver personalized content discovery solutions for Shopify merchants.
Same role as my current role but we executed on the migration of our platform from our on-premise datacenters to Google Cloud Platform in 4 months without any incidents! I also led a talented team of Data Scientists working on Shopify Core - Shopify's foundation - leveraging our massive data assets to inject as much data-driven insights into all aspects of the Shopify Core products and delivering applied machine learning algorithms to help our merchants be more efficient, make more money, and keep them happy on their entrepreneurial journey!
Leading the cross-discipline engineering team (dev, test, product management) that delivered all of Tableau's Database group components - from the AQL (analytical query language) interface to Hyper. As a team we delight our customers by providing a smart query pipeline generating from the AQL language the queries for any of the data sources Tableau can connect to. We have also built a best of breed federated query engine that allows our users to seamlessly create new data sources built from joined or unioned data sources. I have also led the acquisition of Hyper (http://hyper-db.com/) from discovery to its integration in Tableau's products. I have also led the group building our R&D Center in Munich. I was also working closely with sales, support organizations, and marketing to delight out customers.
Leading the platform development team responsible for the development of Tableau's core software stack. A team of 145+ talented software engineers. Responsible for Tableau's platform which consists of: core framework libraries, core engineering platforms and systems, performance technologies (vectorization, parallel computing, etc.), data team (Query optimization, Data Preparation, Data Access), Visual Analysis, Statistics and Predictive Analysis, Tableau Data Engine and APIs, key technical and strategic partnerships, Storytelling&Dashboard formatting back-end, core server and mobile C++ back-end, and VizQL. These services are helping building and deploy Tableau at scale on-premise on multi-node clusters and in the cloud on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Leading the platform development team responsible for the development of Tableau's core software stack. A team of 50+ talented software engineers. Responsible for Tableau's platform which consists of: core framework libraries, core engineering platforms and systems, performance technologies (vectorization, parallel computing, etc.), data team (Query optimization, Data Preparation, Data Access), Visual Analysis, Statistics and Predictive Analysis, Tableau Data Engine and APIs, key technical and strategic partnerships, Storytelling&Dashboard formatting back-end, core server and mobile C++ back-end, and VizQL.