DEEP LORE (About ME)
Life-long software engineer and budding technical executive. I’ve oscillated between writing code and managing people my whole career, because I believe you need to understand the machine to steer the ship. From kernel-level work on Windows to optimizing exabytes of data at Google, I’ve worked on everything from platform infrastructure to end-user products.
My happy place is the intersection of product, engineering, and business—guiding my teams through the broader ecosystem to achieve commercial success and build things they can be proud of.
Off the clock, I pursue diverse and exhausting hobbies: biking up steep hills, running marathons, learning to play hockey, and snowboarding (badly). I balance this out with a healthy(?) dose of video games, elaborate cake baking, and lazy Sunday’s reading books and eating scones in a coffee shop somewhere.
Midwest born and raised.
INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS (BLOGGING)
from my personal blog:
from my management consulting practice:
COOL STORY BRO (WORK HIGHLIGHTS)
Senior Staff Software Engineering Manager, Google (2020 — Now)
Management and IC roles from the very bottom of the storage stack (blob/file/object) to the very top (Google Drive), in addition to the distributed systems primitives used company-wide (locking, leader election, time sync, key management).
- As one of Drive’s overall uber technical leads, optimized distributed syncing, a database holding >3 quadrillion records, caching, and edge infrastructure moving 80+ Tbps, millions of QPS, generating $xx millions in annual savings.
- Led consumer+SMB product development for Google Drive, growing active users by 12% YoY. Delivered myriad features including a new PDF viewer, video player, and even made it so you can talk to your files with AI in Drive/Gemini/AI Studio/NotebookLM/etc. Brought agents to the masses by launching Workspace Studio.
- Technical lead and product owner for Drive 3P Ecosystem, initating and managing strategic partnerships with Box, Egnyte, AODocs, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, and more. Launched the Drive PubSub API.
- Launched BigQuery Omni: multicloud data analytics, accessing data no matter where it lives with the full power of BigQuery.
- Achieved new datacenter economies, scaling foundational infrastructure to support a 2-5x larger footprint within a single cell.
- Hardened Google’s key management infrastructure to be resilient to time bombs, crypto-shredding, and silent data corruption.
- Created engineering efficacy program across 20k+ FTEs in Google Cloud, increasing release velocity 2x, reducing KTLO overhead by 25%, and increasing employee satisfaction by +32pp.
- Co-authored the SWE job ladder governing the careers of 100k+ people.
Boulder, CO
Director, Head of Engineering, Verve Industrial (2018 — 2020)
Built the software organization from scratch, pivoting this consulting firm into a product-led company, acquired by Rockwell Automation. If you live in Mountain Time or New England, your power plant runs my software.
- Implemented low-level network protocols allowing Ansible to manage industrial devices using infrastructure as code (configuring nuclear reactors with YAML is a Good Idea™).
- Designed all organizational processes from scratch: management-by-objective, product discovery, project management. Implemented people strategy, career ladder, and org structure successfully doubling the size of engineering 4 times with super-linear productivity gains.
Madison, WI
Senior Software Architect, Two Sigma (2017 — 2018)
Technical lead-at-large fixing (causing?) problems across the entire 800 SWE engineering organization, delivering trading infra that managed $50B+.
- Shifted the firm to microservices using Bazel, gRPC, Jenkins, and Kubernetes (in a multicloud environment, before it was cool).
- Optimized market simulator platform with automatic petabyte-scale data shuffling and optimistic scheduling (spot instance market making).
- Discovered a love for teaching by building out the Engineering Education program, using technical practicums to train engineers firm-wide.
New York, NY
Software Engineer II, Microsoft (2015 — 2017)
Worked on the Windows Kernel, Hyper-V and Windows Server, as one of the creators of Shielded VM’s and Nano Server. Code I wrote is running on >850 million PC’s.
- Contributed to the UEFI specification. If you hate secure boot, its probably my fault.
- Built a rule-based expert system capable of triaging and root causing production issues in Windows-based compute/storage fabrics.
Redmond, WA
Principal Systems Engineer, UW System Administration (2013 — 2015)
Progressively responsible roles developing web applications (so much PHP) and database/network administration for all 26 UW campuses.
- Initiated and led UW’s migration to the public cloud: preparing a business case, securing executive sponsorship, aligning IT teams across institutions, negotiating contracts with Amazon, and navigating regulatory and legal challenges associated with FISMA/FERPA/HIPAA.
- Designed and implemented hybrid cloud spanning on-prem legacy datacenters and AWS (before it was cool).
Madison, WI
Executive Producer, Head of Engineering, GRECMO (2007 — 2013)
I built a free-fork of Ultima Online, one of the first MMORPG’s ever made.
- Reverse engineered the original network protocol and designed foundational serving infrastructure including distributed in-memory storage, self-healing recovery protocol, and time-travel debugger.
- Doubled and diversified revenue streams through cross-merchandising and in-game microtransactions (before it was cool).
Remote
TUTORIAL LEVELS (Education)
2019
Middle Management Certificate
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2011 — 2015
BS in Mathematics & Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
YAPPING (SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS & CONFERENCE TALKS)
I deliver professional development programming focused on software craftsmanship, stewarding architecture, and influencing organizations in front of audiences as large as 1,000 attendees. In prior years I was active on the conference loop but post-COVID most of my work has been in company-internal workshops/summits.
I love teaching and would like to do it full time; if you’re looking for someone to run your continuing education, training, or mentoring/coaching program, reach out!
2025
Successful Technical Arguments, Middleware Summit
2024
What Analytic Philosophy Teaches Us About Software, Middleware Summit
2023
A Survey of Plugin Systems, Drive API Summit
2022
Org Incentives and Tech Debt, Google Code Health Summit
Using Ethnographic Research to Understand Orgs, Google EngProd Summit
Engineering Excellence at Scale, Google EngProd Summit
2017
Software Quality Workshop, Two Sigma Engineering Education
Intro to Attribute Driven Design, AWS re:Invent
2016
Intro to Shielded VMs, Microsoft Ignite
2011
Git for Beginners, WordCamp Central
Contributing to Open Source, Drupal Camp WI
FINAL_FINAL_FOR_REAL_v3.PSD (DESIGn SAMPLES)
A long time ago I was a professional graphic designer, but I got impatient waiting on the dev team so I picked up the keyboard and never looked back. I still dabble from time-to-time and have basic proficiency in web, branding, print, and even motion graphics.
The Jimbosphere 