Build teams and systems that don’t need me in every room.

I started as a solo systems administrator and never stopped expanding the blast radius. I’ve gone deep in networking, large-scale SRE, security engineering, and data infrastructure. I’m still hands-on in all of it, one way or another. I’ll also build frontends when needed, using whatever makes sense at the time.

Some people watch me use AI tools and call it vibe coding. I call it over a decade of instinct making sure the first version ships miles ahead of everyone else’s third.

I’m currently Head of Engineering at VoiceBrain AI, leading across product, platform, SRE, and DevOps. Shipping AI products, staying hands-on in architecture and code, and building the kind of team that doesn’t need me to be in every room.

I’ve been the person getting paged at 2 AM, the person building the observability stack so nobody gets paged at 2 AM, and the person who ships a frontend on the weekend because the existing one wasn’t good enough. I don’t draw lines between “backend” and “frontend.” I draw a line between shipped and didn’t ship.

Leadership shouldn’t be implicit or guesswork. How I lead, what I expect, and how decisions get made are documented and public:

📖 Manager README

Yes, I use Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and whatever else sharpens the edge. I’m not generating code and hoping it works. I’m generating code and knowing where it will break, then fixing it before it does. That’s what experience buys you: the instinct to ship fast and the judgment to ship correctly.

In November 2024, I wrote a formal specification for helping AI tools understand codebases — a structured format (structure.yaml) for declaring project architecture, patterns, conventions, and AI-specific prompts. This was before CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .clinerules, and .windsurfrules existed. While the ecosystem eventually converged on simpler markdown-based approaches, but the core idea — tell the AI what your project is before it starts reading everything — turned out to be exactly where the industry was headed.

📑 Structure File Spec v1.0.0

• ☕ Drinks too much coffee. Sleeps mostly fine anyway.
• 📚 Reads books about behavior and decision-making
• 🌲 Long walks in the neighborhood or through the woods
• 🎵 Listens to what the kids call “dreampop” and is, in fact, that cool
• 🏠 Madison, WI

• 🔗 LinkedIn
• 💻 GitHub

_{v2.1.6 · probably caffeinated right now}