Resume

Over a decade ago, I began my journey as a self-taught programmer in a small consulting firm in Kennesaw, GA. Since then, I’ve evolved into various roles, from engineer to director, across startups, small businesses, and multi-national corporations. My passion lies in blending technical expertise with leadership to craft digital and human systems that propel business outcomes.

 

Startup

Deepsee.ai
Head of Infrastructure Strategy
March 2022 – Present

Key Responsibilities:

  • Establish infrastructure strategy balancing immediate objectives with scalable future needs.
  • Lead a team crafting a SOC compliant, multi-region, cloud-agnostic infrastructure, optimizing value creation and economic efficiency.
  • Support sales teams with technical expertise for potential customers.
  • Advocate best practices across teams, setting visions for continuous deployment, code quality, and infrastructure as code.
  • Collaborate with AI teams to adopt strategies for rapid ML model iteration.

Key Learnings:

  • In the dynamic world of startups, particularly in regulated industries, discernment becomes vital. Balancing the vision for the future against immediate necessities is challenging. Through this, I’ve realized that discernment, rooted in experience, is crucial for leadership in startup environments, especially when making strategic infrastructure decisions.

HarvestCloud
Co-Founder & CTO
July 2020 – March 2022

Key Responsibilities:

  • Spearheaded the development of a mobile-first application targeting optimization of agricultural operations.
  • Collaboratively worked with fellow co-founder to shape the vision, strategy, and execution of the startup.
  • Despite the venture’s outcome, I acquired a deep understanding of both the technological and business facets of an emerging industry.

Key Learnings:

  • Failures often teach us the most. My journey with HarvestCloud was a testament to that. Although we built an impressive software product, we realized the importance of understanding underlying market dynamics when launching a startup. Several assumptions we made about the industry were misaligned with reality. Before building a solution, it is paramount to validate (or invalidate) core assumptions about the market you’re entering. This ensures that the product aligns with actual market needs.

Generation Tux
Director of Engineering
June 2015 – November 2017

Key Responsibilities:

  • Led a multidisciplinary team focused on building a high-volume e-commerce platform utilizing PHP and Python.
  • Became early adopters and managers of a Kubernetes cluster in AWS EC2.
  • Achieved growth from $0 to over $20 million in annual recurring revenue during tenure.
  • Implemented continuous deployment practices, allowing for dozens of deployments daily.
  • Successfully replaced a Salesforce-based legacy fulfillment system with an in-house solution, saving the company $400,000 annually.

Key Learnings:

  • Building a successful digital system is deeply rooted in understanding and aligning with core business objectives. At Generation Tux, our paramount goal was optimizing the sales and marketing funnel to drive online transactions. This taught me that an effective engineering organization doesn’t operate in isolation. Instead, it thrives on collaboration across various functions and boundaries to achieve tangible results.

Multi-National Corporation

Papa Johns Pizza
Director of Commerce Platforms
June 2018 – July 2020

  • Oversaw the transition from a traditional on-premise monolithic system to cloud deployment on Google’s GCP.
  • Spearheaded the organizational shift to adopt DevOps practices and transition to cloud-based Kubernetes workloads.
  • Managed the development of core APIs for integration with third-party delivery services like Doordash, Postmates, and Grubhub.
  • Transformed QA processes, compressing deployment cycle times from 1 month to 3 days, achieving a 60% reduction in operational expenses.

Key Learnings:

In leading a pivotal segment of the digital transformation at Papa John’s, I gained deep insights into the intricacies of change within large corporations. Key takeaways include:

  • Building consensus is crucial. Digital transformation demands coalition-building across various organizational sectors.
  • Striking a balance is essential. The best solution isn’t always the most technologically advanced; human factors play an equally critical role in bringing a transformational vision to life.

Small Business

Yye Software
Software Engineer
January 2010 – June 2013

Key Responsibilities:

  • Collaborated with small business clients to create solutions addressing key challenges, leveraging .Net technologies.
  • Supported new feature development for existing client projects.
  • Engaged with potential clients to comprehend their business needs, crafting tailored software solutions.

Key Learnings:

  • This foundational role offered me a comprehensive introduction to technology and the software development lifecycle.
  • Through reflections on this phase, I grasped the nuances of working in a small business setting where revenue and profitability are immediate cornerstones for success.