Staff Engineer (Leadership)
Staff Engineer | Cross-Team Technical Leadership
Standards Adopted Across the Org. Zero Were Mandated.
Engineers from teams I'd never onboarded started filing feature requests for my observability tools. No mandate required.
The Engine
Invested daily in team trust — the kind that makes people stay through hard projects. MTTR dropped 95%. L1/L2 overhead fell from 25% to under 5%. Built Operations from solo to 12 engineers across 3 squads.
Adoption Earned
Built the on-call and observability infrastructure, the linters, the coding standards. Led the first load test in company history — 5 sessions, zero failures. Every team ended up using my tools — because they solved actual problems, not because anyone was told to.
Execution Log
Creator & Lead Engineer
Creator & Lead Engineer
Created TRW, an open methodology framework for AI-assisted software development. Built persistent memory, structured workflows, and quality gates so AI coding agents compound discoveries across sessions and projects instead of resetting to zero.
Created methodology framework for AI-assisted development with 19 MCP tools and structured workflows. Built standards that teams adopt because they solve real problems.
Designed multi-agent coordination with specialized roles and quality gates. 2,600+ tests. In beta across 5 coding platforms.
Staff Software Engineer | AI Systems Architect
Staff Software Engineer | AI Systems Architect
Promoted to Staff from Engineering Manager (2+ years total at Unicity, Nov 2023 - Jan 2026). Led AI-powered modernization for a global platform (53 markets). Built the multi-agent system that made 289 endpoint migrations possible. (IC track — AI migration systems and tooling)
Built multi-agent AI migration system with 5 specialized sub-agents, reducing endpoint migration time from hours to under 10 minutes, enabling 289 endpoint migrations.
Reverse-engineered legacy compiled Acucobol systems without source access, producing 45+ migration specifications (1.75MB/50,000+ lines) through AI-assisted bytecode analysis with 99%+ query accuracy.
Deployed 34 parallel AI agents for migration validation framework, achieving 90% error reduction in schema mapping (validation suite, before/after comparison).
Designed Truth Source Architecture enabling AI agents to consume documentation and refactor code without hallucination. Patterns now adopted organization-wide.
Built AI sprint intelligence system using historical transcripts as knowledge base. Benchmarked against human estimates at ±1 story point (blind comparison, 6 sprints), achieving 2.5x throughput (story points over 6 sprints) and 13% sprint efficiency gain.
Designed AI governance framework—read-only agent accounts, DevOps approval workflows, failure-as-state design principles—after identifying blast radius from an unscoped agent action.
Engineering Manager / Technical Lead
Engineering Manager / Technical Lead
Hired to migrate a 289-endpoint legacy system to Laravel. Achieved 96% production traffic with zero major incidents while driving $336K+ annual cost savings. (Management track — platform modernization and delivery)
Cultural Velocity Engine: Maintained high-frequency validation loop (PRs, ADRs, checkpoints, recognition) over 2 years, building social capital that enabled org-wide adoption of architectural standards organically.
Organizational Need → Mechanism: As incident load outpaced team growth, built the observability infrastructure — on-call rotations, automated alerts, monitoring dashboards, and a debugging toolkit (Redis/Xdebug/BPF). Service restored in minutes during real incidents. Tools adopted voluntarily across the engineering org.
Standards That Survive: Led first load test in company history, 5 sessions, no customer-impacting failures. Established observability playbooks and decision records adopted org-wide.
Operational Excellence: Unified diagnostic tooling with deterministic fallbacks, reducing L1/L2 overhead from 25% to <5%. Engineers spend their time building features.
Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer
Promoted to Principal Engineer from Senior Lead (4+ years total at ButcherBox, Jul 2019 - Oct 2023). Owned architecture decisions for a platform processing $2B+ in transactions. Led cross-team architecture, pioneered early GenAI adoption, and single-handedly led flagship Instacart and Shopify integrations.
Cross-Department Influence: Partnered with Operations, Customer Service, and Engineering leadership to align technical investments with business priorities.
Standards Documentation: Created architectural decision records (ADRs) and technical specifications that outlasted individual contributors—knowledge transfer that doesn't walk out the door when someone leaves.
Automation Culture: Introduced AI-assisted development practices. Teams moved from skepticism to building with AI tools by default.
Senior Lead Software Engineer
Senior Lead Software Engineer
Joined right before COVID hit and order volume went through the roof. Built the Operations engineering team from zero (just me) to 9 engineers, broke it into specialized squads, then transitioned to lead all three teams through a monolith-to-microservices migration during COVID-19 10x traffic surge.
Reference Platform: Built platform recognized internally as the benchmark for Testing, Stability, Documentation, Innovation, and cross-department collaboration.
Multi-Team Coordination: Built Operations team from 0 (solo) to 9 engineers across 3 specialized squads, then led all 3 teams (12 engineers total) through cloud-native migration—establishing microservice patterns adopted company-wide.
Technical Mentorship: Built the linters, templates, and coding standards that every team at the company ended up using. The engineering bar rose because the tooling made it easy.
Best Practices Adoption: Pushed DR-tolerant Azure Service Bus SDK across all compatible microservices, setting the precedent for reusable internal tooling.
VP of Engineering & Lead Systems Architect (Founder)
VP of Engineering & Lead Systems Architect (Founder)
Founded and scaled a cross-border e-commerce marketplace from Zero-to-One, serving complex trade and financial flows between China and the U.S.
Designed distributed architecture spanning AWS (US) and Aliyun (China), solving Great Firewall latency so cross-border purchases actually worked.
Architected unified logistics engine integrating 8+ international providers, automating bonded/free-trade import logic across 3 countries.
Implemented multi-currency payment system connecting 19+ payment gateways including ICBC (world's second-largest bank), directly enabling international transaction volume.
Won 2nd place at international technology competition in China; achieved compliance with public company (LifeVantage LFVN - NASDAQ) regulatory requirements.
Built and mentored distributed engineering team of 3+ developers post-MVP, instituting Agile/DevOps practices that scaled with the business.
Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer
Recruited to a specialized task force working under Sir Tim Berners-Lee to engineer decentralized data ecosystems (Solid). Led a team of 6-8 remote developers rescuing a failing insurance fintech project.
Rescued failing insurance platform 6 months behind schedule by restructuring architecture and coordinating 6-8 remote developers—delivered on-time with zero regulatory compliance issues.
Delivered real-time quoting engine handling complex state-specific regulations for all 50 states, processing quotes in under 2 seconds across 200+ rule variations.
Kept the client in the loop with weekly demos. The team was remote and under pressure, but we shipped on time every week.
Founder & Principal Solutions Architect
Founder & Principal Solutions Architect
Led a boutique engineering consultancy delivering full-stack solutions for enterprise clients. Operated as Fractional CTO.
Secured and executed multiple NewBalance.com contracts, directing performance engineering that improved page load times 40% and increased conversion rates measurably.
Operated as Fractional CTO for 5+ enterprise clients simultaneously, managing end-to-end SDLC and establishing engineering standards that outlasted engagements.
Delivered performant, scalable web applications using Node.js, PHP, and Angular—building a consultancy with 100% client retention rate over 4 years.