Summary
Principal engineer and distributed systems architect with 20+ years of experience designing, implementing, and scaling mission-critical systems across Highspot, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, AWS, and Amazon. Experienced technical leader who sets architectural direction, leads engineers through complex systems problems, and mentors engineers into senior technical roles. Track record spanning highly available distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, control planes, large-scale data migration, platform engineering, and developer productivity, with measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, performance, and engineering velocity.
Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Distributed Systems Architecture & Design
- Highly Available & Fault-Tolerant Systems
- Distributed Data & Cross-Region Consistency
- Cloud Infrastructure & Control Planes
- Reliability & Operational Excellence
- Platform Engineering & Developer Infrastructure
- Technical Strategy & Architectural Direction
- Engineering Mentorship & Team Development
Selected Architecture Highlights
- Distributed transactions: Designed transaction subsystems spanning mixed storage backends and regions for Amazon's tier-1 shipping service, enabling cross-region consistency for critical shipping data.
- Large-scale data migration: Built migration tooling that transferred 5B+ records to DynamoDB with zero data loss and minimal downtime.
- Cloud control planes: Developed a compute control plane managing 10K+ virtual machines for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services.
- Multi-datacenter reliability: Designed automated repair systems operating across 15 datacenters, reducing issue resolution time from one month to hours.
- Large-scale scheduling: Architected EC2 Spot Fleet instance-placement strategies that reduced interruption rates by 35% and saved millions in compute costs.
- Engineering platforms: Built opinionated libraries and frameworks adopted across ~20 teams and 500+ engineers, reducing service bootstrap time from 6 weeks to 1 day.
- AI engineering platform: Designed an opinionated agent factory for one-shot tasks and championed standardized AI skills and collaboration patterns.
- Secure AI development: Implemented policy-driven sandboxing for Claude Code and AI-assisted tools, establishing guardrails for safe developer adoption.
Experience
Highspot Inc.
Principal Software Engineer • July 2019 – Present
- Lead architecture for the Smartpages platform serving 100+ enterprise customers, providing technical direction for a team of 6–15 engineers.
- Design and build platform capabilities that improve extensibility, scalability, and performance; platform initiatives resulted in 40% faster page load times.
- Built opinionated libraries and frameworks that reduced engineering bootstrap time from 6 weeks to 1 day, enabling teams to ship production code within 24 hours.
- Provide technical leadership in a cross-functional Product Triad, driving alignment among Engineering, Product, and Design and translating product requirements into durable technical architecture.
- Mentor engineers across teams through architecture, design, implementation, and operational challenges; helped develop 3+ engineers into senior roles.
- Designed and built an opinionated AI agent factory for one-shot tasks, providing a standardized approach for creating and running task-focused agents.
- Championed standardization around AI skills and collaboration, establishing reusable patterns for engineers working with AI-assisted development.
- Proposed and implemented Cloud Development Environment developer-experience initiatives to facilitate cloud-based development and improve engineering workflows.
- Implemented security best practices for AI-assisted development, including a policy-driven Claude Code sandbox using declared policies to constrain tool and environment access.
- Developed the AI Smartpage Builder and AI-generated Spot Overviews using LLM integration and RAG systems for automated content generation.
Technology: Ruby (Padrino/Sinatra), Java, Clojure, TypeScript/React, MongoDB, PostgreSQL
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Principal Member of Technical Staff • September 2016 – July 2019
- Designed automated repair systems spanning 15 datacenters, reducing issue resolution time from one month to hours and improving operational resilience.
- Built core infrastructure packages adopted by ~20 teams and 500+ engineers, establishing a common foundation for infrastructure automation across OCI.
- Developed a compute control plane for internal infrastructure services managing 10K+ virtual machines, addressing the reliability and operational challenges of large-scale cloud infrastructure.
Technology: Java (Dropwizard), Python (Flask), Oracle Database
Amazon Web Services
Software Development Engineer • July 2015 – September 2016
- Architected EC2 Spot Fleet instance-placement strategies that reduced interruption rates by 35% and saved millions in compute costs.
- Integrated CloudWatch-based operational insights to enable proactive issue detection and reduce MTTR by 60%.
- Led initiatives to improve service reliability and operational excellence, achieving 99.999% availability for critical workloads.
Technology: Java (Spring), DynamoDB
Amazon.com
Software Development Engineer • November 2011 – July 2015
- Led the rewrite of Project Gibraltar, a tier-1 shipping service, improving reliability from weekly outages to zero outages.
- Built scalable data migration tooling that transferred 5B+ records to DynamoDB with zero data loss and minimal downtime.
- Designed distributed transaction subsystems for mixed storage backends, enabling cross-region consistency for critical shipping data.
Technology: Java (Spring/Coral), PHP, Oracle Database, DynamoDB
Earlier Career
ADP Inc. — Senior Software Engineer — Design and development of HR and Benefits solutions
Manhattan Associates — Software Engineer — Production support and enhancements for enterprise clients
Scentric, Inc. — Software Engineer / Technical Staff — Framework development, install automation, and proof-of-concept development for the CTO
Infosys Technologies — Software Engineer — Java/J2EE development for warehouse management systems
Technical Skills
Architecture: Distributed Systems, Fault Tolerance, High Availability, Distributed Data, Cross-Region Systems, Control Planes, Platform Engineering, Service-Oriented Architecture
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Kubernetes, Docker, Cloud Development Environments
Languages: Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Ruby, Clojure
Data: DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle Database, MySQL
Applied AI: AI Agents, AI Skills, LLM Integration, Generative AI, RAG Systems, Vector Databases, Prompt Engineering, AI-assisted Development & Security