Employment

Appen AI (formerly Figure Eight) is a leading AI automation company serving many of the top 50 tech companies, including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and many others. After meeting their CTO and VP of Engineering, I was convinced I could help kickstart some stalled efforts and empower the engineering teams by moving their DevOps practice from a central team to a practice within teams.

I was promoted from Director of Engineering to Senior Director of Engineering after only a year, before ultimately moving on once Generative AI and in-house AI operations displaced much of Appen's business.

Key Results

• Reduced deployment lead time by 75% enabling product teams to self-serve infrastructure
• Ran ML platform to support 100K+ annotation jobs daily across FAANG clients
• Unified authentication across 4 legacy systems reducing login friction by 85%

Sourceability is an electronic component parts middleman and distributor with quality check facilities around the globe, that undertook to digitize a very email, excel and connection based industry of finding and purchasing huge BOMs of electronic component parts for manufacturers around the globe.

Key Results

• Secured $3M analytics API contract within 3 months of product launch
• Achieved 400% increase in organic search index uptake thru SEO optimization
• Enabled team to deploy on day one reducing time-to-first-deploy from weeks to hours

MapR Technologies was one of the top 3 Hadoop Distribution and Service companies (the other two being Cloudera and Hortonworks). It was an exciting organization to work for with an excellent product offering. In my time there I saw it evolve significantly in terms of size, product value, adoption of software craftsmanship best practices, and market opportunity.

I was awarded two “MapR Star Awards” from our leadership team, and I owe that in part to a great group of colleagues, who helped me champion self-service devops as a discipline (as opposed to a separate team that added more friction than value).

I was a key participant in the Employee Advisory Group, helping steer culture from the grassroots while building directional consensus among peers in leadership roles as well as my superiors

Key Results

• Unified 5 disparate DevOps tools into single portal reducing context switching by 80%
• Trained 8+ engineers in Scala and functional programming with Coursera certifications
• Implemented comprehensive observability across Hadoop stack monitoring 100+ metrics

Lookout was my first job in the SF Bay Area. They provided a mobile security application that used various techniques to detect malware or risk on apple and android products, including by running applications and looking for runtime signatures of malware as well as performing static analysis of the source and binaries, within the constraints of the google and apple technology platforms and app stores.

Lookout exposed me to automated environment creation including dev environments with vagrant and docker as well as the culture of startups in the Bay.

Key Results

• Trained 10+ engineers in functional programming concepts increasing Scala adoption by 40%
• Authored scale test automation exercising 4 integrated stacks identifying 20+ scaling bottlenecks
• Created reusable workshop materials adopted by 3 additional engineering / qa teams

Explorys was a spin-off of Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University that sought to apply big data via hadoop to improve health care by identifying cohorts of interest, predicting medical outcomes, and more.

Having spent 7 years in Enterprise at Progressive Insurance I wanted to get back into startup mode and live fast and take risks, and so I ultimately was persuaded to join.

Key Results

• Delivered new admin dashboard supporting 10+ healthcare organizations
• Enhanced MDL enabling complex temporal healthcare measure definitions
• Reduced user management operations time by 65% with streamlined UI

I was hired at Progressive Insurance because of my Actionscript expertise, gained running my own agency, Cleveweb.com, which they needed to beat their competition in the Web 2.0 game.

I quickly climbed the ranks from contractor to senior to lead by delivering results and being the go-to web developer on a large 20 person team.

I eventually made REF 2.0 (UI Framework), used by multiple teams; and CQM (Code Quality Metrics), to automatically test and enforce code quality thru metrics, as well as other developer productivity and quality enhancing tools.

I was one of 12 consultants as the business looked to scale our XP discipline as part of Enterprise SDLC Adoption.

Key Results

• Reduced requirements-to-deployment cycle time by ~35% on key projects through Agile adoption
• Reduced complex quote page render time by 93% (from 28 seconds to 2 seconds)
• Implemented automated quality gates across 12 development teams reducing production bugs significantly

While double majoring in piano performance and computer science, I started Cleveweb.com to fund my schooling and housing, while providing web design, development and hosting services to about 15 different companies in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area.

Through this experience, I was forced to learn all aspects of the business, as well as the seriousness of investing one's own money and time into a business that cannot afford to be wasteful.

Initially, I provided virtual hosting services via a rented rack, but later I brought in high speed network connections to my office and hosted services on several high powered linux boxes that I administered and maintained.

This portfolio of projects helped me land a full time contract and later employment with Progressive Insurance in a Senior and then Lead-level role.

Key Results

• Increased online product inquiries by 750% within first year of launch
• Built searchable art gallery database with 80+ artworks and 25+ artists
• Delivered full website with animated product demo increasing lead conversion by 40%

As part of the step-up program in my high school, I was able to intern, and later work for, ExchangeNet, which became Core.com, an ISP (Internet Service Provider) operating in the great lakes region .

It was here that I was first exposed to the Internet, and at a time where 56k phone-based modems were the standard, it was really cool getting to see how fast the internet was at an ISP's office!

I worked full time at this job to pay for college next door at Cleveland State University, where I double majored in computer science and piano performance.

Key Results

• Maintained 95%+ customer satisfaction score resolving 50+ support tickets weekly
• Reduced average ticket resolution time by 40% through systematic troubleshooting
• Enabled 50+ customers to successfully host websites on Apache virtual hosts