Hands-on technologist; technical cofounder/executive/leader; entrepreneur; creative; maker; AI enthusiast, ML engineer and search architect.With decades of experience in software development as individual contributor, Principal Engineer, Senior Director, Head of Eng and CTO, the sweet spot for me is working with great people on innovative solutions to exciting technical challenges that drive impact at scale.I have been fortunate to find fulfillment doing exactly that as first hire, tech lead, technical cofounder as well as head of engineering for a handful of ventures in the eCommerce, music, recommendation, Search and social audio spaces to name just a few areas of my consumer product focus over the years. I have long held a keen interest in AI/ML and artificial neural networks—nowadays perhaps better known as deep learning—my focus of study in the Engineering & Applied Sciences at Caltech. I implemented a neural network for handwritten digit recognition as a student project in 1998 and continued my study of Machine Learning as both student and TA before graduating as President, Class of 2000 from Caltech. As first full-time engineering hire (back-end) at StumbleUpon, I worked on improving recommendation algorithms, innovating novel methods of performance analysis/visualization. There I architected an in-house content measurement framework using genetic algorithms to instrument social media and viral email campaigns. Advocating for the adoption of industry best practices for API development, I drove the creation of a new role, Head of Web Services, lead internal initiatives in Search and Discovery, and lead our strategic partnership with Facebook as a featured Facebook Platform launch partner.I cofounded mobile app incubator Schematic Labs as CTO/Head of Engineering where I lead the creation of SoundTracking for mobile + web which quickly grew to 100k users in the first weekend after launching @ SXSW Interactive, and ultimately to over 1M+ users before acquisition by Napster/Rhapsody in 2014.There, as Sr. Director of Engineering, I headed up the Music Content Platform team responsible for ensuring metadata and assets were ingested and indexed as quickly as possible. Having found great success leveraging Elasticsearch to power Search @ SoundTracking, I was able to convince my boss Brian Ringer (CTO/EVP) to grant stewardship of Search to MCP as well and lead the re-architecture of our search engine to enable real-time indexing for the first time, mentoring my eng team in new technologies Elasticsearch, memcached, MongoDB.