Portland, Oregon
Engineering leader with ten years experience running distributed teams at Observable, Netlify, GitLab, and New Relic. Mostly developer tools and some data analysis tools.
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: Netlify, GitLab, New Relic. I like building tools that make other builders better.
I'm best at 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 that what engineering builds lines up with what the business actually needs. It also means owning the parts nobody else wants to, like security and compliance.
Lately I'm hands-on with AI-assisted engineering. I've been working 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 (and usually better) than 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.
Lead Developer
Led a small engineering team building a SaaS product in Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript. Worked directly with the CEO on the roadmap and closely with our designer and customer success team.
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 something adjacent. Most of my career has been focused on growing engineering teams and shaping how work gets done and shipped: hiring, setting technical direction, and getting more out of a team without grinding it down. I've managed managers and engineers directly, stayed close to product, and partnered with design, sales, and marketing. If you know a team that could use that, especially one figuring out how engineering should work as they grow, I'd love to hear about it.
In the meantime, I've been building Sound Off for fun. It's 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 now, you can try it! I started by speccing out the app and iterating on that with Claude, then mocked up every screen in Claude Design. With everything specced and designed, I established a basic engineering process, used Claude Code to build the app, and hosted it on Netlify. Deciding what it should feel like first and working out a bunch of unknowns improved the outcome more than just the code generation did. It's been a lot of fun!
Other things I tinker with: a personal agent named Lucy, running on a repurposed MacBook, that drafts my daily briefing and keeps an eye on my inbox and calendar, and deals with menial tasks. I'm having fun building a couple of other small apps but nothing worth mentioning yet.
Easiest ways to reach me, or to hear me talk about all of the above.