Summary
Platform engineers are invisible when things work. After 15+ years building CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes infrastructure, and developer tooling, I’ve learned that the real work isn’t the technical design — it’s getting +30 engineers to trust a shared standard, and keeping it running when they push it in ways you didn’t anticipate. I focus on the systems that let teams ship confidently on a Friday. Recent work: on-demand Kubernetes environments and company-wide CI/CD standards. Currently exploring how AI/LLM agent workflows change what “developer tooling” even means.
Experience
Basis Technologies (formerly Centro) — Chicago, IL
Principal Software Engineer | Apr 2023–Present
Architected and owned platform infrastructure for a +30-engineer organization; Developer Liaison across product and platform teams.
- Built on-demand integration environments on AWS EKS — cut setup from days/weeks to hours, scaled to 50–60 concurrent instances
- Authored the team-wide CI/CD standard — multi-stage pipeline, multi-stage Docker builds, semantic versioning, multiple deployment modes
- Built a long-lived Sales demo environment on Kubernetes — daily synthetic data, weekly automated rebuilds, on-demand org/user provisioning
- Pushed a multi-team CI/CD migration across the finish line despite consistent competition from product work — legacy pipeline retired Jan 2025
- Made enablement part of major pipeline overhauls — running Kubernetes bootcamps to bring engineering teams along each time the platform shifted
AWS EKS, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Kafka, Snowflake, Datadog, Python, Ruby on Rails
Staff Software Engineer | Oct 2021–Apr 2023
- Migrated all data pipeline workloads to Kubernetes across 5+ workload types (ingestion, batch, streaming, Hadoop)
- Drove engineering-wide CI/CD adoption — built the first standardized pipelines for core API and analytics services
- Built a shared integration environment system (cloud data warehouse, event streaming, persistent storage)
- Completed a Hadoop NameNode HA migration on Kubernetes
AWS EKS, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Hadoop, Kafka, Snowflake, Python, Ruby
Staff Software Engineer | Oct 2020–Oct 2021
- Migrated the analytics data backend from monolith to a dedicated microservice
- Built Kubernetes local-dev tooling adopted across engineering; set up the initial K8s environment for the core platform app
- Built a Dockerized synthetic data generation service for integration testing
Lead Software Engineer | May 2019–Oct 2020
- Led a campaign-performance dashboard initiative — replaced fragmented tables with actionable charts (pacing, KPI, agency margin), cutting time to spot at-risk campaigns
- Designed and shipped a real-time campaign collaboration system, enabling teams to create and manage ad campaigns together
- Led product-analytics GDPR compliance integration, including owning the engineering hiring process for QA and frontend roles
Senior / Software Engineer | Jul 2015–May 2019
- Built the backend for a bulk-edit system that let users make large-scale changes across campaigns simultaneously
- Resolved a deadlock issue where concurrent campaign edits could leave two users stuck — unified the overlapping data models and added rollback handling
- Refactored the monolithic Campaign Overview endpoint into parallel view-specific endpoints for progressive rendering
- Provided technical mentorship to engineers — code review, design guidance, and teaching Ruby/Rails concepts
Tukaiz, LLC — Franklin Park, IL
Software Development Manager / Application Development Specialist | Dec 2011–Jul 2015
- Built a multi-tenant LocomotiveCMS application with email-marketing integration
- Diagnosed and mitigated an active DOS attack on AWS infrastructure while keeping the application running
- Designed a CDN-delivered document storage system for large uploads and documented the client onboarding process around it
Volition / THQ — Champaign, IL
Technical Artist | Jun 2007–Jan 2011
Pipeline and tooling for AAA games (Saints Row 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla) — Python/MaxScript editors with live in-game feedback and a camera-based parallax shader solution.
Projects
Diagram Builder | 2026 | TypeScript, Node, React, Three.js, Neo4j
Open-source code visualization platform — parses repos into a dependency graph, renders 2D/3D layouts (force-directed, radial-BFS), and exports to multiple formats. Built with agent-driven workflows using Claude Code and the Anthropic SDK.
Observability Sandbox | 2026 | Ruby, SolidQueue, Postgres, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
Sandbox application demoing observability of an LLM Chatbot. Uses Grafana to show logs and traces of application locally for learning to add observability to your application.
Skills
| Area | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Languages | Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, SQL |
| Frameworks | Ruby on Rails, Node.js, React, Sinatra |
| Infrastructure | AWS EKS, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Kafka, Snowflake, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Datadog |
| CI/CD | Pipeline design and standards, Docker multi-stage builds, semantic versioning, Harness |
| AI/LLM | Claude Agent SDK, Anthropic API, Claude Code, agent workflow design |
| Practices | Platform architecture, distributed systems, developer tooling, DX, observability, technical mentorship |
Education
Savannah College of Art and Design — Savannah, GA Bachelor of Fine Arts, Interactive Design and Game Development | 2002–2006
Code Academy (now the Starter League) — Chicago, IL Ruby on Rails Development | 2011