New York, New York, United States
Leader with expertise in improving usability, scalability, and ownership of technology products by inventing and enhancing overall architecture and cloud infrastructure. Effective mentor who drives professional growth of engineers and builds strong and diverse team cultures of innovation and continuous learning. Creative, solutions-focused, architecturally minded team member constantly sought out by stakeholders and fellow engineers alike for both out-of-the-box solutions and gut/reality checks. Engineer known for tackling the hard/high-risk problems - often cited by managers as the MVP for going above and beyond his share of the work with grace and humor.
Joined as the 6th employee and founding Lead Engineer; promoted to VP within 15 months. Report directly to the CEO and serve as a core member of the executive team, shaping company strategy, culture, and growth trajectory. Lead all engineering functions — including mobile, frontend, backend, DevOps, and QA — during a period of rapid scaling from pre-seed to post-revenue. Played a key role in securing $20M+ in funding and reaching a $65M valuation within two years. Select Accomplishments • Built and scaled a cross-functional engineering team of 12+, achieving zero voluntary attrition over 18 months through intentional culture-building and career pathways. • Oversaw the development and launch of the company’s flagship app, supporting 250,000+ monthly active users and processing 100M+ daily data points. • Partnered with Fortune 100 companies and top 50 hedge funds, representing engineering in high-stakes client engagements and driving enterprise traction. • Implemented Pinecone-powered semantic and postgreSQL powered exact search for personal AI, improving retrieval speed and accuracy for large-scale datasets. • Promoted rapidly through three leadership levels — Lead, Director, and VP — based on success inteam building, execution, and collaboration.
Select Accomplishments: • Spearheaded an engineering reorg to align team structure with strategic priorities, improve ownership, and enhance team morale and efficiency. • Introduced onboarding success metrics—including the “Road to 20 Points” system—to support early success, increase clarity, and reduce time to contribution for new hires. • Formalized structured mentoring and career development practices, fostering a culture of growth, retention, and internal mobility within the engineering team.
Select Accomplishments: • Established a templated service architecture that reduced time-to-production for new services from 4 months to under 3 weeks, accelerating product delivery across the org. • Led the evaluation, onboarding, and integration of critical third-party platforms (e.g., Confluent Kafka, Iterable, Finix, Persona) to support scalability, compliance, and user engagement. • Owned third-party tooling strategy and budget management, aligning investments with engineering and business priorities to maximize ROI.
Built an in-house CRM tool and participated in both architecture and coding. Oversaw developers and conducted code reviews. Built a QA team, rolled out Agile, and later implemented a Kanban scheduling pipeline. Revamped the design concept of the for-profit website, making it content-oriented and design-forward. Created a uniform design standard for rapid content creation and SEO, increasing reach and conversions. Onboarded non-technical staff and maintained oversight over design/content/web decisions. Supported the Executive Director with technology vision and integration. Select Accomplishments • Reduced administrative costs and analysis time by integrating extensive bulk reporting, forecasting, and long-term data management solutions by student/class/session. • Cut test grading time by 75% (from hours with multiple graders to minutes with one CRM user) through an optical mark recognition solution. • Implemented bulk and single-user SMS communication system, linking records directly in the database and creating a dashboard for admin oversight. • Designed a Common-core style application for high schoolers to simulate college applications. • Increased daily search impressions 7x (~100 to ~700) and boosted unique daily users 6x (~30 to ~200) within 6 months through SEO and design improvements.
Taught top math class for SAT prep camp. Also provided one-on-one and small group instruction. Helped facilitate staff and worked closely with assistant teachers. NB: Yleana Leadership Academy was a first-year non-profit startup initiative aimed at bringing SAT instruction to 36 socioeconomically disadvantaged innercity adolescents from Boston and NYC. It was run as a camp, on Bentley University’s campus, and completely funded by a private donor. It was a huge success - in 3.5 weeks, we raised SAT scores between 250-300 points on average per student, many of whom entered Yleana at levels of remediation that were uncommon in standardized test prep.
Worked closely with TPMs, principal engineers, and external teams to lead SDLC efforts. Partnered with multiple teams to successfully onboard applications to the ecosystem. Overhauled company-wide logging principles and streamlined observability practices. Select Accomplishments • Improved onboarding and knowledge transfer processes for new engineers, reducing ramp-up time. • Automated CI/CD pipelines to make deployments region-agnostic, improving scalability. • Led international expansion optimization, enabling faster rollout to new global markets.
Created the roadmap for services to accelerate software delivery velocity while improving the experience for internal and external clients. Advised 10+ teams on flattening batch processes through event streaming and established company-wide standards for event-driven systems. Developed hiring process standards to better measure interview precision. Select Accomplishments • Planned and built real-time streaming services from CRM (Salesforce) to Kafka clusters, enabling teams to convert batch jobs to near real time. • Onboarded Confluent Cloud (Kafka-as-a-Service), reducing infrastructure overhead and boosting scalability. • Standardized Kafka consumer and producer implementations with a Spring Boot template, cutting microservice go-to-market time from days to hours. • Delivered company-wide presentations to train engineers on designing event-driven systems. • Enhanced hiring process quality by developing a structured pool of interview solutions. • Promoted to Staff Engineer within one year for leadership and technical impact.