I’m a software engineer with 15+ years of experience building internal tools, developer infrastructure, and platforms that help engineering teams move faster. I’ve worked across the stack - from distributed systems processing billions of events to CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms, secrets management, and developer portals. I care about removing friction, making the secure thing the easy thing, and building tools that hold up over time.
I’ve been fully remote since 2009 and have spent most of my career at HostPapa, where I’ve grown from senior developer to team lead to Director of Software Engineering.
Leadership Journey
My path into leadership was gradual and grounded in the same instinct that’s always driven me: see a problem, fix it. When I joined HostPapa as a senior developer, I was focused on modernizing how the team worked - moving us from FTP deployments and SVN to automated pipelines, Git, and proper CI/CD. As the team and codebase grew, so did the scope of what needed building and the number of people doing the building.
By the time I became Team Lead I was managing a small team while staying deeply technical - designing architecture, building internal tools, and working directly with stakeholders across the business to understand what engineering could enable for them. Some of my most impactful work happened in this era, including the tools that became central to HostPapa’s acquisition growth strategy.
As Director, I’ve led an engineering organization that grew significantly through the Hostopia acquisition in mid-2023, eventually overseeing around 50 engineers across 14 teams. That scale brought new challenges - team structure, career development, cross-team coordination - but I’ve remained hands-on throughout.
Notable Work
CI/CD & Developer Infrastructure
Self-Hosted GitHub Actions
Oversaw and guided implementation of self-hosted runner infrastructure supporting 10+ engineering teams, enabling secure deployments to private internal systems while significantly reducing CI costs. Replaced an aging Jenkins installation and gave teams full ownership of their pipelines.
Pipeline Optimization
Reduced CI pipeline execution from 45 minutes to under 3 through parallelization, test restructuring, and working with teams to rethink what actually belongs in a pipeline. The goal: fast feedback loops as a default, not a luxury.
Production-Safe Acceptance Test Suite
Built a comprehensive acceptance test suite that validates deployments directly in production environments, reducing post-deployment validation from 30-45 minutes of manual checking to 7 minutes of automated confidence. Still running years later.
Secrets Management
HashiCorp Vault
Implemented Vault as a centralized secrets platform across CI/CD pipelines, multi-environment infrastructure (production and non-production), and Kubernetes applications. The goal was to make security and developer experience reinforce each other rather than compete - in the best case, a developer clones a repo, authenticates with Vault, and runs a single command to have a fully working local environment without touching a config file.
Observability & Monitoring
Datadog Platform
Spearheaded Datadog implementation that transformed production monitoring from a 2-hour manual investigation into a 30-second dashboard check. Implemented log aggregation, real user monitoring, PagerDuty alerting, and automated health checks so teams detect problems before customers do.
Automated Health Monitoring
Built automated testing for critical order flows, dashboards, and key systems integrated with Datadog and PagerDuty. Enabled proactive issue detection across the platform.
Developer Platform & Documentation
Internal Developer Portal (Backstage)
Led implementation of Spotify’s Backstage to replace an expensive vendor solution for API documentation that couldn’t scale to a growing engineering organization. Centralized service catalog, standardized API documentation, and improved how engineers find and understand internal systems.
Developer Productivity Tools
AI-Powered PR Review Summarizer
Built an internal tool that summarizes pull request review history and resolved comments using AI. When code review generates 10-30 comments across several rounds, the final reviewer spends 20+ minutes just reconstructing what happened before they can evaluate whether the code is ready. This tool brings that to under 2 minutes. Review cycle time improvement: 70%+.
Kafka Cost Calculator
Created an internal cost estimation tool for teams building event-driven systems on Confluent Cloud. Helps engineering understand the infrastructure cost implications of design decisions - message size, retention, throughput - before committing to an architecture. Became useful beyond engineering as a tool for estimating partner and sales costs as well.
Distributed Systems
Fraud Detection Platform
Architected and built a Go-based microservice processing 2+ billion email authentication events monthly (tens of millions per hour). A Kafka-based workflow enriches login events with MaxMind geolocation data and performs anomaly detection across 30-day windows. At this volume every architectural decision is also a cost decision - built an internal cost calculator alongside the system so teams could reason about the infrastructure implications of their choices.
Domain Search Microservice
Built a high-performance domain search service with sub-second global response times, enabling real-time availability checking across multiple TLDs.
Stack & Tools
Go • PHP • TypeScript/JavaScript • MySQL • PostgreSQL • Redis • GitHub Actions • Kubernetes • Docker • Kafka • HashiCorp Vault • Datadog • Pulumi • Backstage • Confluent Cloud