Engineering executive with 25+ years building and transforming high-performance
organizations — from 0→1 platform builds at startups to FAANG-scale
infrastructure at Meta and AWS. Track record of delivering tens of millions in cost
savings, scaling teams from single digits to 100+, and driving cultural transformation
through AI-native engineering, platform modernization, and disciplined execution.
Operates at executive and technical levels across distributed systems, platform
engineering, and organizational design.
My best work sits at the intersection of leadership, transformation, and architecture
— hybrid roles that demand both strategic vision and the ability to get into the
trenches. I have deep experience building high-performance teams from scratch,
transforming broken organizations, and owning product strategy at every stage:
bootstrapped startup, venture-backed growth, and mature multinational.
I favor lightweight process, open source technology, and Conway’s Law as an
organizational design principle. Core focus areas: JVM/distributed systems, Kubernetes,
platform engineering, SRE/DevOps, AI-native operations, and Big Data/ML infrastructure.
Skill Sets
Java/JVM
Microservices and large-scale distributed systems; Spring/Netflix OSS, Dropwizard; POCs in Scala, Kotlin, Go, Clojure
Microservices, Distributed Systems, Reactive, Highly Available
Hosting
AWS, Digital Ocean, GCP, Azure
Process
Agile (Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban); process as a tactic for iterative value delivery
Teams
High-performance teams from scratch; small cross-functional startup teams; large globally distributed orgs
Experience
Meta
Production Engineering Manager
August 2025 – Present
Lead a 16-engineer team building the capacity governance platform for Meta’s
ad-serving infrastructure — the system that controls how resources are allocated,
enforced, and reclaimed across dozens of services supporting billions in annual ad revenue.
Designing and shipping a self-service platform replacing manual resource management — provisioning, quota enforcement, cost attribution, and anomaly detection.
Introducing AI agents into infrastructure operations for cost anomaly detection, replacing manual engineering analysis with automated workflows.
Driving tens of millions in annual infrastructure cost savings through platform automation and AI-accelerated optimization.
Built three engineering pods from an inherited flat structure, each with clear ownership: resource optimization, fleet observability, and enforcement.
Grew team from 10 to 16 engineers in two quarters; managing the full people lifecycle — hiring, performance calibration, and career development for IC3 through IC6.
Operating in a PM-less model — owning problem framing, roadmap trade-offs, and execution priorities directly.
Amazon / AWS
July 2020 – August 2025
Engineering Manager, AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Teams own core pieces of the EKS customer experience: how customers install and use any addon on EKS, across open-source and AWS-owned addons.
Own an AI-based Infrastructure-as-Code solution built into Kubernetes and EKS, spanning ACK, KRO, and new product development.
Engineering Manager, AWS Managed Grafana
May 2022 – April 2024
Single-threaded owner of Amazon Managed Grafana end-to-end; part of the AWS Open Source Observability stack.
Led delivery of Custom Plugins support for re:Invent 2023.
Led delivery of new ECS/Fargate DataPlane for re:Invent 2022.
Created standard project and program mechanisms adopted across the org.
Built a new S3 line-of-business team in Austin from 1 to 9 engineers in one quarter.
Engineering Manager, AWS S3
July 2020 – March 2021
Built and led Ignite, a high-performance S3 innovation team with 4 concurrent workstreams: S3 Primitives, S3 BigData (Citadel), S3 SecOps (Mechanic), and S3 Network Architecture (ONAC).
Mechanic team eliminated the need for SSH access to production environments; reduced SSH access by 90% in 4 months.
Citadel shipped S3’s first worldwide real-time hardware failure reporting engine — baseline technology for ML and predictive analytics across S3 fleets.
Wayfair
Associate Director
July 2021 – April 2022
Org of 30 reports, 3 managers, 6+ senior ICs. Launched a program making Engineering Leadership own hiring outcomes; on-boarded 7 engineers in under 2 months across 2 continents.
Identified JVM as Wayfair’s growth area; built the org from 1 FT engineer to a fully staffed 10-person team with dedicated EMs in EU and US, supporting 300+ tier-1 and tier-2 services.
Created a 3-person Apache Flink team for event-based services; shipped Flink across Wayfair Engineering.
Built a team to own and curate base Docker images and Helm charts running ~900 production GKE services.
Introduced OKR and MBR reporting structure now replicated at parent org level.
Owned and executed a 2-year transformation plan across all of engineering: process, people, architecture, and culture.
Scaled the platform from an early-stage marketplace architecture to enterprise-ready infrastructure — 100x increase in technical delivery capacity and 10,000x growth in transactional throughput — in 2 years, on budget.
Defined architecture and vision for modern platform: Java, Kubernetes, Kafka.
Built the Shared Services division from scratch: Data, Search, Developer Tools, and APIs teams.
Doubled engineering division size without a dedicated recruiter.
Created and managed first engineering budget; came in on target.
Walked in as a software engineer; walked out as CTO.
Built multiple award-winning platforms (Players Life, Play4Fun Network/SGUniverse) that transformed the US gaming industry.
Re-architected a heavily distributed, debt-laden platform using PaaS, microservices, and the Strangler pattern.
Architected and built a cloud-native AWS platform in Python that served as a low-end disruptor in B2B social casino gaming; became market leader on track for $30M revenue in 2018 with a 5-person founding team.
Solely designed and wrote an industry-changing Java-based web services platform connected to 1,000+ slot machines across North America.
Education
University of Chicago
Master of Arts — Social Sciences (Interdisciplinary) · 1996–1998