Professional Summary


Senior platform-focused engineering manager with a non-linear path from philosophy and self-taught programming to engineering school, startup co-founder, and leader of rapid-response platform teams. A trusted "fixer" recognized for stepping into high-risk, ambiguous situations—including compliance incidents, inherited legacy systems, platform instability, and sales over-commitments—and driving them to durable solutions through calm execution and strong systems thinking. Combines hands-on technical depth with a proven track record of translating between engineering, finance, product, and enterprise clients. Pragmatic architect who favors domain-driven design, clean architecture, and robust observability over framework hype.

Professional Experience


Springbig, Inc.

Oct 2025 - Present
Engineering Manager / Deployment & Business Analysis Manager

Rehired the exact same day following a corporate reduction-in-force at Flexshopper—a testament to exceptional institutional trust and prior high-impact performance—to direct deployments, change management, and rapid-response remediation for a white-labeled enterprise messaging platform.

  • Resolved an existential domain-reputation crisis where major security vendors flagged merchant domains as suspicious; traced the root cause to legacy Cloudflare Workers regex failures under bot crawling and shipped a surgical fix in under 24 hours to fully restore platform trust.
  • Architected a high-performance custom audience segmentation engine using PostgreSQL JSONB containment queries and inverted indexes, replacing expensive join-table chains to drastically improve evaluation speed, predictability, and maintainability.
  • Rescued platform stability across microservices following a major end-of-life Ruby/Rails upgrade by rapidly identifying deep dependency failures and deploying targeted patches across teams in a single night.
  • Enforced cross-repository CI/CD compliance by engineering a declarative configuration script that actively detects and autonomously corrects pipeline and merge-check drift across dozens of GitHub and Bitbucket repositories.
  • Serve as the primary engineering liaison for executive leadership, finance, vendors, and clients during critical escalations, seamlessly translating business risk into technical execution.
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Incident

Domain reputation crisis

When major security vendors and browsers began flagging merchant-facing domains as suspicious, the issue escalated from a nuisance into an existential trust problem for a white-labeled platform serving regulated businesses. The root cause was eventually traced to brittle regular expressions in legacy Cloudflare Workers that threw exceptions under bot crawling, making legitimate domains appear unsafe to automated scanners. A surgical fix resolved the issue in under a day and led to a more durable framework for platform trust signals going forward.

Architecture

Segmentation refactor

The custom audience builder had accreted into inefficient, difficult-to-reason-about query chains. Analysis of real merchant behavior showed that most “custom” audiences were recurring combinations of a small set of reusable base conditions, not truly unique queries. The redesign shifted the service toward precomputed base segments and reusable named groupings, with PostgreSQL JSONB containment queries and inverted indexing replacing heavy join-table chains for common evaluation paths.

Platform

Repo governance and upgrade recovery

A separate stream of platform work focused on reducing drift and operational fragility across the engineering estate. CI/CD and merge policies were re-aligned across GitHub and Bitbucket repositories through declarative, periodically enforced configuration, and a bad Ruby/Rails version bump was stabilized by recognizing a common dependency root cause behind multiple scattered breakage reports and patching the gaps in a single night.

Flexshopper, Inc.

Feb 2024 - Oct 2025
Senior Software Engineer / Platform & Support Lead

Partnered with an incoming CTO to rebuild the engineering organization, establishing support-driven intake workflows and leading a rapid-response development team under intense regulatory pressure.

  • Engineered an immutable, tamper-resistant secure-hash ledger of third-party vendor API calls, providing auditors with verifiable mathematical proof of good-faith execution despite extreme instability in vendor collateral valuations.
  • Slashed execution time of a business-critical ETL pipeline by 50% (from 8+ hours to ~4 hours), transforming a highly volatile nightly job feeding purchase-approval flows into a robust, self-healing process.
  • Developed a "13-flavor" user-space omni-connector to safely unify data access across MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, New Relic, and Kubernetes logs, enabling siloed risk teams to modernize analytics pipelines without destabilizing end-of-life production servers.
  • Scaled the engineering organization by onboarding and mentoring 10+ newly hired developers, establishing rigorous operational standards, architectural context, and deployment practices.
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Compliance

Immutable vendor ledger

Under mounting regulatory pressure, collateral valuation outputs from a third-party compliance vendor showed dramatic inconsistencies even for identical inputs. To demonstrate the company’s good-faith use of the vendor product, an immutable, tamper-resistant ledger of API calls was built using secure hashing to preserve requests and responses for later verification by auditors and regulators.

Data

ETL and data modernization

A business-critical ETL job feeding purchase-approval flows was refactored from a flaky 8+ hour nightly process into a robust, self-healing, notification-rich pipeline that completed in roughly half the time. In parallel, engineering-adjacent risk and data teams were given a safer modernization path via a multi-source user-space connector that unified access to systems such as MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, New Relic, and Kubernetes log sinks without destabilizing brittle end-of-life production servers.

Leadership

Team rebuilding and onboarding

The role sat within a broader effort to rebuild engineering under a new CTO during a period of operational and regulatory strain. Alongside rapid-response support work, more than ten newly hired developers were onboarded and mentored, helping establish context, practices, and day-to-day standards before those engineers transitioned to longer-term teams.

Springbig, Inc.

May 2022 - Feb 2024
Engineering Platform Team Lead (Promoted from Business Analyst)

Rapidly advanced from Business Analyst to Platform Team Lead by aggressively triaging neglected technical debt and acting as a vital liaison between engineering, finance, and customer success.

  • Averted major legal and compliance risk within an acquired Laravel/PHP product when SMS opt-out enforcement failed; diagnosed a Year 2038 timestamp overflow in a 32-bit MariaDB column and deployed a critical, fully compliant hotfix.
  • Rescued an enterprise sales commitment by completely redesigning the platform's legacy rewards tiering model, enabling seeded tier initialization and frictionless onboarding for a major client.
  • Exposed the redesigned rewards tiering architecture via external APIs and webhook flows backed by materialized views and staging tables, providing clients real-time access to spend totals without expensive runtime computation.
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Compliance

Year 2038 opt-out failure

In an acquired Laravel/PHP product with little in-house expertise, SMS opt-out enforcement silently failed and created immediate legal exposure. Investigation alongside the technical founder traced the issue to a real-world Year 2038 overflow in a 32-bit MariaDB column used to represent a far-future “next eligible send” date, and a pragmatic fix restored compliant behavior until the product could be sunset.

Feature delivery

Rewards tiering redesign

A major enterprise opportunity exposed gaps between promised functionality and what the legacy rewards tiering model could actually support. The tiering capability was redesigned to allow seeded tier initialization, reduce reliance on brittle legacy behavior, and expose real-time spend and visit data through external APIs and webhook flows backed by materialized views and staging tables.

HD Data Science, LLC

Sep 2019 – May 2021
Co-Founder & Director of Engineering

Co-founded and drove product/engineering strategy for a B2B SaaS platform providing scalable, skill-based assessments for data scientists.

  • Architected and maintained the core proprietary platform used to dynamically provision scalable, isolated remote development environments for complex candidate workflows.
  • Navigated complex enterprise sales cycles, securing and retaining recurring contracts with Fortune 500 companies and two international banks.
  • Shaped product positioning and operational strategy to place 1st out of a cohort of 30+ companies in a highly competitive startup incubator.

Omead Properties, LLC

Jul 2017 – Jul 2019
System Administrator
  • Streamlined operational infrastructure by migrating physical resources to digital workflows and improving day-to-day continuity.
  • Developed custom web applications to automate lease, tenant management, and utility payment tracking workflows.