Portland, Oregon
Engineering leader with ten years experience running distributed teams at Observable, Netlify, GitLab, and New Relic. Mostly developer tools, which is not an accident.
He/Him
I've spent the last ten years leading engineering teams, most of that time at companies selling to people who build software for a living: Observable, Netlify, GitLab, New Relic. I like building tools that make other builders better.
What I'm best at is org design and the less glamorous work around it: hiring managers who can hire well themselves, keeping process light enough that people still ship, and making sure what engineering builds lines up with what the business actually needs. That includes the parts nobody wants to own, like security and compliance.
Lately I'm hands-on with AI-assisted engineering, mostly because I wanted to find out what actually changes when you use it every day. The short version: deciding what a thing should feel like before deciding how to build it matters more now, not less. And reading the thing yourself is still different from reading a summary of it.
VP of Engineering
Owned engineering vision, strategy, and delivery for the department. Hired and kept a strong team, ran risk and compliance, and worked shoulder to shoulder with design, marketing, and sales. Helped the team launch Observable Cloud in 2024 and Observable Canvases in 2025.
Director of Engineering, previously Senior Engineering Manager
Built out the teams that owned accounts, permissions, auth, pricing and packaging, and growth. Hired several managers and a lot of engineers, led large tooling migrations, and folded in teams from acquisitions. Program-managed a pricing and packaging overhaul that touched most of the department.
Engineering Manager, Monitor
Ran the backend Monitor team inside a company that was all remote before that was common. Spent a good part of it working out what distributed teamwork should actually look like across time zones, with product and UX in the loop rather than downstream.
Engineering Manager, previously Senior Software Engineer and Software Engineer
Five years on APM. First building it in Ruby and JavaScript, helping customers find the bottlenecks in their production systems, then managing the APM UI team as it built new experiences in React while still owning the legacy code a lot of customers relied on.
Before that I was a developer and lead developer at small studios and agencies in Portland and Los Angeles, mostly Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, including a dev shop I co-founded and ran for three years.
I'm looking for my next role, Director or VP of Engineering, ideally in developer tools or somewhere adjacent. Most of my career has been about growing engineering teams, shaping organizations and processes, hiring, and setting technical direction at companies where the product is the platform. If you know a team that could use that, especially one figuring out how engineering should work as it scales, I'd love to hear about it.
In the meantime, I'm building Sound Off, a Music League style app where a friend group gets a weekly prompt, everyone submits a track, and votes get spread across the playlist. It's live in beta. I built it design-first: pixel-perfect mockups of every screen before any app code, then a written plan before the build. That order changed the outcome more than the code generation did.
Other things I tinker with: a personal agent named Lucy running on a repurposed MacBook that drafts my daily briefing and watches my inbox but never sends anything on my behalf, and a flight tracker in Rust that is still mostly a plan.
Easiest ways to reach me, or to hear me talk about all of the above.