Lake Placid, New York, United States
Like tap water, data should be easy, reliable, and safe to use. Empowering communities by making it so has been a recurring theme throughout my career. The other important theme, since I was 5, has been the joy of learning from and teaching others how to understand and solve problems with code. I am passionate about transforming complex challenges into high-impact, scalable solutions. Across startups and large enterprises, I’ve driven step-function improvements in capability, performance, and cost by leading cross-functional teams to innovate and optimize user experiences, business processes, and the technologies that support them. I am relied on to inform or make key decisions due to my deep, end-to-end analyses and cogent presentations. I thrive on problem-solving and love tackling ambiguous, high-stakes objectives. I’ve earned a reputation for fostering collaboration among teams and for building robust platforms that continue to unlock new value propositions as they grow and evolve. From engineering user interfaces to architecting enterprise data management platforms, I’ve consistently delivered results that realize business value at scale while maintaining the highest standards of technical integrity. The best part of my job is developing high-performance software engineering teams. I direct focus toward achieving outcomes rather than just delivering technology and understanding problems rather than just proposing solutions. I ask questions -- especially "Why?" I am a demanding reviewer, but also respectful, practical, and helpful. I help engineers achieve technical mastery and operational success not only through direct coaching and mentorship, but also by setting an example of quality and judicious risk-taking through direct contribution. Outside of my job, you'll find me hiking, cross-country skiing, or working on more tangible projects at home and around my community. For art or for utility, requiring strength or precision, I find learning and practicing the craft of physical construction rewarding no matter the medium -- especially when it materializes a design I first work out in code. Whether it’s defining architectural strategies, guiding product development, or teaching engineers, I’m committed to making a lasting impact and accelerating organizational success. I'm motivated by the missions I adopt and dedicated to the people I serve. I bring an attentive ear, a gregarious demeanor, and an independent voice. Connect with me to talk about tough technical problems, disruptive solutions, and building exceptional software!
Served as chief architect for data management platforms (RDBMS, NoSQL, cache, search, messaging), data access frameworks, data processing services (Spark, Flink), observability (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Splunk), experimentation (A/B and multivariate), and the core Walmart transactional and behavioral data feeds. Drove clarity on problems to be solved, outcomes to be achieved, product definitions and requirements, and technical approaches. Resolved key technical questions, challenges, and risks. Leveraged opportunities to create efficiency and new value propositions. Developed engineers' technical and communication skills by setting the quality bar, by direct mentorship, and by example. Voting member of the Global Tech Patent Committee. Repeated track co-chair for Walmart's annual internal technical conference. • Built an in-house distributed tracing product suite that delivers 3x the scale at 1/2 the cost of the leading 3rd-party APM solution it replaced, enabling enterprise-wide service-call visibility for the first time at Walmart • Gained 10x trace ingest efficiency and improved correctness by introducing end-to-end simulation-based and reducible property testing • Enabled fresh (<10s), fast (<1s) multi-point lookups over long time windows (>1y) of high-cardinality (>1T/d) data by personally implementing a stateless paged-trie LSMT index over object storage in Go • Kicked off and designed Java APIs for a managed compression service that achieved a 70% improvement in p99.99 latency and 21% cost reduction in its initial pilot • Contributed append functionality to Apache Arrow's Go Parquet writer (#40654) • Found and suggested the adopted fix for a bug in the Azure SDK for Go (#23142)
Co-founded the Global Tech Enterprise Architecture team and associated Architecture Council. Mapped mainframe, in-store, and enterprise datacenter applications to modern cloud architectures and gated exceptional funding. Co-developed multi-cloud workload and data placement strategies. Defined and drove prioritization of needed platform services. Assessed and refined corporate information technology policies and audit processes. Defined general non-functional requirements and promoted "shift left" engineering excellence. Analyzed incidents to uncover common causes, contributing factors, and develop remediation plans. • Still guiding 100+ designs per month as of November 2024 via organic adoption of the architecture design template I wrote and offered to the community in 2021 • Influenced allocation of over $100MM of Global Tech initiative funding for remediation of operational risk and development of platform capabilities • Improved SOX posture for Kafka workloads by guiding design of platform audit service and driving resolution of mTLS implementation deficiency • Eliminated head-of-line blocking incidents and reduced operational overhead by 65% in order processing flows by demonstrating how to decouple concurrent message processing from sequential partitions and guiding its incorporation into a Kafka consumer proxy service
Improved performance, reliability, security of Walmart Technology behavioral telemetry, system telemetry, and observability tooling. Captured and distributed user activity data, HTTP ingress logs, and advertising impressions for Walmart mobile applications and web properties. Managed session and visitor tracking cookies and identity synchronization. Captured and stored metrics, traces, and logs for Walmart services and compute infrastructure. Provided Real User Monitoring (RUM), Application Performance Management (APM), log analysis, monitoring, alerting, and notification services to Global Tech teams. Supported near-realtime feeds and populated data lake tables that power search relevance, marketing, personalization, product analytics, site reliability, infrastructure engineering, security, and other use cases. • Banked 0.34% revenue lift on Walmart.com by implementing precise continuous auditing of telemetry completeness, earning the business's trust, and improving site speed by removing Adobe Analytics beacons • Increased orders per visitor by 0.67% and converted visitors by 0.58% by leading design and guiding implementation of server-side marketing tags • Helped consumers meet processing SLOs for peak events while controlling costs by automating calculation of tailored traffic projection, capacity management, and throughput throttling across multi-tenant Kafka clusters and topics • Unlocked Google Cloud Platform for telemetry use cases and improved delivery latency and reliability by migrating data lake tables and processing from Hadoop in private datacenters • Drove clarity around CCPA requirements and options; designed and delivered k-anonymization and multi-device opt-out propagation solutions
Led the engineering and data science team at Me.dium/OneRiot to deliver 400 million advertising impressions per month with enhanced targeting based on social signals, doubling search ad click through rates (CTRs) and boosting mobile display ad effectiveness by over 10x to achieve CTRs of 1%. Developed prototypes used to secure funding, Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions, AJAX-based co-browsing UI, horizontally scalable backend services, and shared-world datastore. Set up Hadoop environment for data science and populated with browser extension, Twitter, Facebook, and reference data feeds. Instituted end-to-end automated functional and operational testing for services and models. Enabled social geo-targeting by developing density-aware geo-tiling, inferencing, and low-latency retrieval services. Company acquired by @WalmartLabs.
Enhanced Ecosystems' Technical Information Environment to support internet-based collaboration over SGML and XML documents among hundreds of concurrent users in the technical, legal, and educational publishing industries. Enabled collaboration across the broader enterprise by tracking interactions across common Windows applications and creating an implicit web of fine-grained relationships among web pages, emails, and other documents and build maps, recommend actions, and provide services to any enterprise role.
Developed product and technical strategies to bring to market the hypermedia technology developed at TechnoTeacher in collaboration with ISOGEN. Investment dried up with the collapse of the dot-com bubble.