I lead a newly created Engineering Productivity organization within Visa's Issuing Solutions Product Delivery organization, focused on accelerating high-quality software delivery through improved DevOps tooling and practices, robust testing strategies, automation wherever feasible, and AI-assisted workflows.

From August 2022 to January 2024: Member of the engineering leadership team of the Geo Machine Intelligence (GeoMI) organization. GeoMI's mission is to accelerate Google's map-making capabilities by applying state-of-the-art computer vision and AI technologies to automatically update Google Map's digital model of the real world from signals derived from ground-level, aerial, and satellite imagery. I led the half of the GeoMI organization focused on our production data workflows and common platforms.Beyond technical leadership, my responsibilities include coaching and mentoring members of my team, helping them to identify and execute a path for career development, conducting in-depth regular performance evaluations, recruiting and hiring new team members, and working to align our team's goals and priorities with those of Google overall.Prior to August 2022:I managed two software engineering teams within Google Drive: the Drive Android team and Drive API team. The former is responsible for developing, releasing, and maintaining the Drive mobile app on the Android platform. The latter owns the Drive API, used both internally within Google and externally by third parties to provide programmatic access to data in Google Drive. The scope of the teams that I managed grew from 12 direct reports when I started to a team of 30+ engineers including two sub-managers.

I began my work at ThinkTopic primarily developing a personalized product recommendation system for a client in the e-commerce domain. My work involved developing bespoke analysis services and web applications in Clojure and Clojurescript (particularly using the React-like Reagent framework for Clojurescript) as well as the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack of technologies. That role evolved into serving as an individual contributor and product owner for ThinkTopic’s internal data science platform for managing datasets, training new neural network models, and visualizing results.

I founded RKDN Digital to help non-profits, NGOs, public benefit corporations, and other mission-focused enterprises adopt and adapt modern digital technologies and practices. I had hoped to use my expertise in machine learning, agile software application development, Lean organizational transformation, DevOps, and infrastructure management to help clients launch or accelerate their own digital initiatives. I ultimately decided that solopreneurship was not the right fit for me.

Directly reporting to the CEO, I was responsible for managing all day-to-day operations for ATS, a company with approximately 130 employees. I managed the vice-presidents of our two business unit divisions as well as the CTO and IT staff. I worked collaboratively with the CEO and the executive management team to craft and evolve ATS’s strategy. I introduced practices to improve our decision-making practices and to ensure alignment of short-term and long-term objectives throughout the organization. My focus areas included: * Adopting Lean practices to continually improve all aspects of our business, focusing our attention on activities that generate maximum value for our customers, * Improving communications and transparency internally in order to empower our employees to excel and to take ownership of the solutions they deliver,* Introducing modern tools and processes to measure and manage our effectiveness,* Developing a commercial business development strategy to grow ATS beyond the federal marketplace.

Dual-hatted in a CIO/CTO role, my primary mission was to develop and instill a DevOps culture within our organization, with a focus on continual improvement and experimentation. I managed the IT and R&D departments within ATS.My focus areas included:* Instituting a Continuous Delivery model for all software projects* Exploring new business models for software services and delivery* Implementing IaaS/PaaS for our development efforts* Identifying technologies that simplify and streamline IT* Instilling security and privacy best practices throughout our applications and our infrastructure* Improving visibility of IT operations* Fostering a culture of innovation, quality, and agilityI oversaw R&D-related business development activities, concentrating on Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) opportunities.Technologies: Vagrant, Salt, Amazon Web Services, Cloudbees, Jenkins, Neo4j, Titan, AngularJS, JIRA, Confluence

Managed internal research and development efforts in areas of:* Software development best practices and Agile delivery methodologies* Big data analytics and highly scalable infrastructures* Web-scale software architectures* Information extraction, text analytics, and natural language processingTechnologies: GATE, NTLK, Tesseract OCR, MeteorJS, DC.js, MongoDB, Python

Provided systems and software architectural guidance for the next-generation Patents End-to-End (PE2E) project within the US Patent and Trademark Office, focusing on integration with legacy systems, data modeling, ETL processes, and design of a loosely coupled service-oriented architecture. Contributed to ATS's internal R&D efforts in cloud architectures, NoSQL storage, and mobile computingTechnologies: J2EE, JBoss SOA Platform, jBPM, Drools, RestEasy, JBoss ESB, Spring Framework, Hibernate, MySQL, Maven

Led system integration efforts for Orbis’ legacy and cloud-based entity extraction engines, leveraging Apache Hadoop, Cassandra, Accumulo and other FOSS/GOSS solutions. Provided customer-site cloud-scale Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise, coordinating with analytics efforts of related programs within the community.Developed software that integrates multiple commercial Named Entity Recognition (NER) products to provide faceted semantic search and navigation capabilities for tactical intelligence analysts, enabling them to better exploit multi-source message traffic. Implemented performance/scalability tests which led to order-of-magnitude improvement in SPARQL queries, leveraging Oracle 11g (R2), and Sesame RDF store.Technologies: J2SE, Hadoop, Cassandra, Accumulo, OpenRDF Sesame, SPARQL, Oracle 11gR2, Tomcat, Python, GATE, Maven

Developed probabilistic inference and data analysis algorithms in Java for information extraction/retrieval applications, primarily geared toward DoD agencies interested in unsupervised categorization of unstructured text documents and discovery of relationships among named entities discovered in those documents.Led research efforts as Principal Investigator on DARPA Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contract and primary Technical Lead on multi-year contract with the Office of Naval Research. Aggressively pursued new funding opportunities via SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) proposals under various government agencies including NASA, DARPA, and AFRL.Designed, configured, and maintained a transportable Beowulf Linux cluster (13-node 2.5GHz Dual Quad-core Xeon cluster with bonded Gigabit Ethernet interconnects) for use in developing our company's information-retrieval and data-mining capabilities as well as our simulations for the Missile Defense Agency.Served as Interim Manager of nine scientists, engineers and software developers during manager's three-monthleave of absence. This included ensuring contract deliverables were provided on time, adjusting developer-to-contract allocations to meet our revenue goals, and maintaining our business development efforts.Technologies: J2SE, JBoss AS 4, Statistical Topic Modeling, Perceus Cluster Management

Specialized in teaching of algebra/trigonometry-based introductory physics sequence (PSU Physics 250/251) for students primarily from the biological and life sciences. Integrated results from recent Physics Education Research (PER) into curriculum. Authored new recitation and laboratory activities based on peer-instruction model.Provided administrative support for calculus-based introductory electromagnetism course (PSU Physics 212) and general administrative support to entire introductory course effort. Worked to ensure consistent and fair administration of course from semester to semester, for enrollments varying between 500 to 800 students each semester.Led weekly training sessions with teaching assistants to review past and upcoming classroom activities and to introduce effective teaching strategies. Organized Physics Education Journal Club (est. Fall 2006), a reading group for physics graduate and undergraduate students to introduce, discuss, and debate recent findings in PER literature.Provided network and systems support for departmental education network, undergraduate computer-based labs, and the introductory course effort's web presence/archives.

Performed research in Prof. Pablo Laguna's group on a three-dimensional fully-nonlinear, finite-difference time-evolution code for the calculation of solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity in the context of an initial-boundary value problem.Wrote applications to visualize numerical relativity group's massive multi-dimensional datasets. Coordinated group visualization effort internally for debugging/analysis of simulations and externally for publication, presentations, and education/outreach.Specialized in dynamic singularity excision techniques and related testbeds for the purpose of allowing black holes to move through computational domain during simulations of black hole collisions and orbits. Designed a workable infrastructure to allow code to attack new problems of varying astrophysical interest.Assembled and maintained two Beowulf clusters (circa 2000: 20-node 733 MHz Dual Pentium III cluster with Fast Ethernet interconnect and circa 2002: 40-node 2.2 GHz Dual Xeon cluster with Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet interconnects). Provided system administration of heterogeneous Linux / Windows network for numerical relativity research group.