As Head of Platform Engineering at Supernatural, I oversee 24 reports in my report chain, includes 3 engineering managers and 7 staff-level engineers.From my early startup experiences, I've come to understand the critical impact of talent density, team cohesion, and the developer experience on both team productivity and morale. A harmonious team composition has the power to inspire members to reach unparalleled levels of excellence. Conversely, a toxic team culture can degenerate into competitive strife, where individuals tear each other down in an attempt to rise to the top. I've made the conscious decision to build a positive and productive team. I am proud to have built the most formidable engineering team in my career to date, which includes several accomplished staff engineers, hand-picked by me from previous startups, and bringing the group to Meta. To the Super Meta Within team!

Acquired by Meta in 2023:https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/meta-completes-acquisition-of-vr-fitness-company-within/My professional journey at Within spanned six years, from a Series-A startup to a Series-C company, culminating in an acquisition by Meta. From 2017, I led the entire technological development of the core platform team, then simply known as the "Backend Team". Accomplishments include building multiple backend services, a custom CMS with RBAC, and a comprehensive internal tool pipeline for content management and Within 360 video transcoding. In 2018, we expanded the CMS to manage Wonderscope episodes, complete with all associated thumbnails, metadata, and Unity asset bundles.From late 2018 through 2020, I led the CMS expansion, migrating backend services to support the management of all Supernatural content assets (songs, beatmaps, coach audios, coach videos, etc.), and all workout publishing workflows. Our platform also supported scheduled programming, A/B testing/percent rollout, feature flags, kill switch, QA tools, user management features, and a new staging service/web tool for song licensing, clearance, and reporting.I began with a team of three mid-level engineers in 2017 and, by 2023, grew this group to a team of 25 mid-to-principal level engineers, spanning four engineering managers. The departments included API Services, DevOps, Core Unity Team, VR Beatmap Editor tools, and Data Engineering team.Throughout this journey, I interviewed hundreds of candidates, placing a strong emphasis on technical strength (coding tests), talent density, team cohesion, and developer experience in my hiring process. The goal was to maintain team focus by minimizing developer distractions and hurdles and fostering the network effect of a critical mass of T-shaped personalities. This strategy resulted in extraordinary feature velocity from a relatively small team, where the whole is significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

Acquired by Meta in 2023:https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/meta-completes-acquisition-of-vr-fitness-company-within/My professional journey at Within spanned six years, from a Series-A startup to a Series-C company, culminating in an acquisition by Meta. From 2017, I led the entire technological development of the core platform team, then simply known as the "Backend Team". Accomplishments include building multiple backend services, a custom CMS with RBAC, and a comprehensive internal tool pipeline for content management and Within 360 video transcoding. In 2018, we expanded the CMS to manage Wonderscope episodes, complete with all associated thumbnails, metadata, and Unity asset bundles.From late 2018 through 2020, I led the CMS expansion, migrating backend services to support the management of all Supernatural content assets (songs, beatmaps, coach audios, coach videos, etc.), and all workout publishing workflows. Our platform also supported scheduled programming, A/B testing/percent rollout, feature flags, kill switch, QA tools, user management features, and a new staging service/web tool for song licensing, clearance, and reporting.I began with a team of three mid-level engineers in 2017 and, by 2023, grew this group to a team of 25 mid-to-principal level engineers, spanning four engineering managers. The departments included API Services, DevOps, Core Unity Team, VR Beatmap Editor tools, and Data Engineering team.Throughout this journey, I interviewed hundreds of candidates, placing a strong emphasis on technical strength (coding tests), talent density, team cohesion, and developer experience in my hiring process. The goal was to maintain team focus by minimizing developer distractions and hurdles and fostering the network effect of a critical mass of T-shaped personalities. This strategy resulted in extraordinary feature velocity from a relatively small team, where the whole is significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

Cessna and Cirrus aircraft fleet acquisition, leasing, and philanthropy.

• Led entire technology development for a fully built-out VR video streaming, discovery, CDN and content distribution platform with a global audience, attracted 700k installs with 1.11 million unique users to our VR apps.• Recruited and led 5 in-house web, mobile, Unity and video playback engineers, as well as up to 3 contract engineers to build out apps across 8 disparate VR platforms with maximum code-reuse and minimal QA redundancy, specifically: WebVR, Google Cardboard on Android/iOS, Google Daydream, Oculus Gear VR/Rift, HTC Vive, and Sony PlayStation VR. • Oversaw all code-review, QA, product requirement acceptance, site-reliability, code deployment, app store submission, analytics and user feedback efforts. • Contributed 17% of all code by line count, and acted as full-stack engineer personally responsible for documentation, API service layer, database schema and ORM management, data integration, ETL worker processes (to accomplish features such as Heatmap), AWS infrastructure engineering and dev ops.

• Responsible for recruiting, interviewing and discovering high-caliber software engineers for ZEFR at the new grad, mid, and senior levels, through structured, algorithmic screening quizzes and on-site coding interviews. Screened over 500 candidates, directly responsible for building out a 35+ person engineering team in 2 years.• Led agile teams between 2-8 persons on various engineering projects: from leveraging Youtube APIs for big data analytics and ad revenue optimization, to building 3 generations of a scalable automated YouTube Postroll production rendering tool chain, to a significant YouTube Channel Management tool suite. Team members ranged from PhD to new college grads, all were brought up to speed and became productive within weeks, not months. Continued to grow talent by implementing regular one-on-ones, aligning interests to growth areas and providing coaching in key areas including architecture, algorithms, code maintainability, and soft skills.• Mentored and grew a key QA/Release engineering asset at ZEFR from new grad talent. We implemented continuous integration servers (Jenkins), enabled one-click automated unit testing/coverage report and continuous deployment build processes to Heroku, AWS, and CDN. Substantially streamlined QA efforts and improved code ship quality across all teams, and subtly enforced best practices over time. He is now the second most feared man in the entire engineering department.

• Responsible for setting up major infrastructures and platforms, including automated build process, version, minify, and continuous deployment to the cloud/S3/EC2, multi-environment server clustering, and maintaining 99.99% uptime.• Managed and enforced database schema change procedures.• Responsible for initial network setup, including routing equipment, wireless, VPN and more.• Implemented model layer and session caching, improving performance, utilizing Memcache.• Architected and constructed scheduled task and message queue based asynchronous back-end job processing.• Server monitoring and uptime tracking of production system, with PagerDuty on-call rotation schedule.• Co-created custom MVC framework, LAMP stack, jQuery, and developed custom API interface for external requests.• Implemented VOTRS (Vendor Onboarding Ticketing and Rating System) leading to increased efficiency of operations and cost reduction by 5X.• Developed advanced food ordering, catering, and dryclean fulfillment capabilities.• Interviewed and technically evaluated 7 of the engineering team members hired after the first 3.

Developed PHP web applications on the LAMP stack with complete payment handling backend.Frontend UI development from Photoshop to CSS and jQuery.Backend development with MySQL.Managed entire financial, accounting, legal operations, and IT infrastructure of the company.Business development and sales for our vendor program.Company was acquired in Nov 2010 by BetterWorks.

Board member of the University of Illinois Alumni Club. Started as a director of business development in July 2008, planned tech-speaker series in various Silicon Valley companies such as Cisco, AMD, and Nvidia; then became VP of Events in 2009, before stepping up as President in 2010. Lead a group of 15 members on the executive board, consisting of VPs and Directors of Events, Finance, Membership, and Communication and brought many quality social and educational events to the SF and South Bay area (http://www.sfbayillini.org). Alumni club then expanded into North Bay and East Bay areas.

Cisco IOS Software Engineer• Developed platform dependent code in C to run Cisco IOS with the newly designed "Nile" ASIC chip in ME3600 and ME3800 series Metro Ethernet switches (first customer shipment in Oct 2010).• Operation administration and management features• IOS image self extraction and upgrade features• Spearheaded a data structure initialization Perl framework that generated structured C code, which became instrumental to the bring-up and subsequent configurations of Cisco IOS on the Nile networking ASIC.Previous position at Cisco Nile ASIC Design Team:• Custom "Nile" ASIC which powers an advanced 24G+2 10G MetroEthernet aggregation switch. • Taped out a 15M+ gate ASIC.• Designed scripts for emulation validation effort and managed a emulation platform of 54 FPGAs.

DFT Engineer on ATPG pattern generations and VCS verification. Worked as a co-op during two school semesters as well as every summer between 2004 and 2007.Built up expertise in Perl from developing DFT overnight regression and ATPG pattern generation flow tools.Taped out Barcelona K10 high-performance quad core processor in 2007.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K10