Summary

I build systems — of technology and of people. I reduce problems to first principles, find the leverage points, and ship. I’ve been a founder, CTO, principal architect, and IC across infrastructure, platform engineering, blockchain, neurotechnology, and music tech. I lead with pragmatism, not dogma.

Experience

Founder & CTO — GRÜV

2018 — Present

Music technology and decentralized systems. Empowering artists and fans through novel technology. Building the music markets and publishing tools of tomorrow.

CTO & Co-Founder — LegatumX

2017 — 2020

Blockchain-backed last will and testament distribution. Designed and built hybrid systems combining conventional web infrastructure with decentralized protocols for security, assurance, and immutability.

Principal Architect — Kernel (Bryan Johnson)

2017 — 2018

One of the first industry hires at Kernel. Architected platforms, pipelines, and software for bleeding-edge neurotechnology and neuroscience research. Reported directly to the Founder/CEO and COO. Structured and hired the software & systems engineering team.

Director of Infrastructure & DevOps / Acting CISO — ChowNow

2017

Owned infrastructure (corporate & platform), hired and coached a DevOps team. Led PCI Level-1 compliance cycle including rearchitecture of client-facing applications and AWS infrastructure. Authored WISP, risk assessments, and disaster recovery plans.

Lead Cloud Ops / DevOps — Scripps Networks Interactive (ULive)

2015 — 2017

Owned DevOps & CloudOps. Led design, architecture, and implementation of major engineering initiatives. Built toolchains, pipelines, and infrastructure automation. Identified and paid down significant technical debt.

Lead DevOps Engineer / Senior Consultant — Doctorsoft Corporation

2015 — 2016

Rejoined to help scale during a period of doubled customer base. Built highly available MariaDB clusters, implemented monitoring, authored Terraform and Ansible codebases, migrated infrastructure into multi-tiered VPC with zero downtime.

DevOps Engineer II — Connexity

2014 — 2015

First DevOps hire. Led scaling efforts to double production infrastructure during their highest recorded revenue quarter. Managed 200K+ QPS across Hadoop, Nginx, Redis, ZooKeeper, and more.

Earlier Roles

2010 — 2014

Platform engineering at InVitae. Database & systems engineering at Doctorsoft (first stint). NOC technician and sysadmin at Alchemy Communications. The foundations.

Skills

Infrastructure & Cloud: AWS (deep), Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, CoreOS

Languages: Go, Python, Bash, Ruby, JavaScript, Nix

Data: PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Hadoop ecosystem

Practices: Platform engineering, DevSecOps, PCI compliance, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional
  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional
  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator