As a founding or early engineer at multiple startups, I’m aware of the unique challenges of early-stage companies, and specialize in driving their success through a technical lens. I work with founding teams to make key hires, ensuring alignment of values and goals, understanding that early employees have outsized lasting impact on company culture and decision-making processes.I advise and lead engineering teams with a focus on maximizing both velocity and cost-effectiveness. By understanding the diverse backgrounds and unique needs of team members, I recommend and, at times, implement tailored solutions. While my approach is frequently technical, it is driven by a blended strategy that prioritizes team communication and a nuanced understanding of individual team members' backgrounds, needs, and goals.Some notable achievements, despite most specifics being under NDA, include a 50% reduction in hosting costs, successful resolution of performance improvement plan (PIP) situations getting employees back on the path to success, and defining a tech spec process that provided an explicit and more accurate balance of project scope and timeline that increased team performance and cohesion while reducing surprises.

Empowered new engineers to level-up quickly by creating an environment where mistakes are low-risk learning opportunities. Helped experienced team members bring in tools to detect regressions so they can focus on training the team and other higher-level challenges with a high degree of autonomy.Overhauled internal tools resulting in 10x faster feedback loops for engineers. Increased team velocity through a focus on predictability. Documented processes and developed training materials while creating space for growth and evolution.Led integration between Epic’s and BYJUs’ authentication systems post-acquisition; wrote tech specs and managed comms on the 50-person project including engineering, QA, product, and ops teams. Helped identify high-risk areas to direct resource allocation.Gave company-wide presentations requested by upper management, along with demos and training sessions for the engineering teams.Laid off during shutdown of all remaining North America engineering resources.

Hired, trained, & managed a high-performing team of engineers with no turnover during my tenure. Architected and led development of the core backend of the Knowledge Graph. Every day, this ingested >50k new product reviews and roundups into the knowledge graph, scraped >1M prices across the internet, and fulfilled >100M API queries. Also designed and built tools and workflows to QA and curate the data.Built code review and CI/CD pipelines for all teams and helped develop a metrics-driven culture. This resulted in fewer defects shipped, faster delivery to production, more consistency across teams, and improved visibility of infra/ops. Negotiated improved pricing for telemetry tools decreasing costs by ~15%.Wrote Lustre’s privacy policy, which helps earn the trust of users by treating customer data as a liability. This improved install conversion, and was an asset during fundraising.Led cross-team effort to create a unified API across all services and Typescript SDK. This created a central source of truth and documentation, resulting in an improved (and type-safe!) workflow for the dev team.Migrated server infrastructure to Kubernetes (GKE) following analysis of technical goals. Reduced costs by ~40%; created env capable of performantly running current and future services.

Revamped invoicing and inventory tracking systems; assisted in ERP integration. This laid the groundwork for opening the company’s first fulfillment center.Worked with frontend team to migrate from jQuery to React and Typescript. This increased team velocity, reduced number of defects, and improved web app performance.

Consulting for software startups, primarily focusing on platform payments and server infrastructure.

Architected and implemented WePay's money engine (first three versions), responsible for billions of dollars of payment volume.Led engineering team through PCI compliance audits, serving as point contact for auditing team; helped implement supporting software changes and operational protocols.Extreme focus on security, reliability and uptime with a 99.995% SLA, including CI systems, TDD, and infrastructure monitoring. Built numerous internal tools to support these efforts.

Developed custom web applications, implemented designs and created various scripts to accomplish the task at hand. Worked on various projects ranging from developing a social networking website to a content management system.