Director of Engineering · Atlanta

I build the systems
that help people find
what they didn't know
they were looking for.

12 years in software. 4 leading teams. The thread through all of it: personalization — building technology that understands individual taste, not just aggregate behavior.

How I think →
Principles
01
Personalization is a form of respect.
Generic recommendations are a failure of attention. When a system shows you something that could be for anyone, it's telling you it hasn't tried to understand you. I've spent my career building the opposite — systems that get specific, that learn, that earn trust by being right in ways that feel personal. At Instacart, I lead the team responsible for what 8 million households see when they open the app. That's not a search problem. That's a taste problem.
02
The best AI knows when to get out of the way.
Capability without restraint is just noise. I'm building an ethical framework for AI agents — not as a compliance exercise, but because I believe the systems that earn lasting trust are the ones that know their limits. Autonomy is a spectrum. The hard engineering problem isn't making AI do more. It's making AI understand when not to.
03
Great teams are systems too.
I run an 80-person engineering org the way I'd design a recommendation engine — with feedback loops, clear signal, and a bias toward the individual over the average. The best engineering cultures I've seen treat talent like taste: specific, cultivated, not interchangeable. I've grown, protected, and challenged engineers at every level. I do it the same way every time — by paying close attention.
04
Build it yourself before you scale it.
I still write code. I build side projects not as a hobby but as a discipline — to stay honest about what's actually hard. A taste graph for Mexico City. An AI agent framework for containers. A portfolio engine with tax-loss harvesting. These aren't showcases. They're the reason I can walk into an architecture review and know where the assumptions are hiding.
Track Record
2013 — Present
2022 — Present
Instacart
Director of Engineering
Leading 80 engineers across Order Experience, Search, Personalization, Meals, Health, and Discover. Six domains, each touching the core of how customers find and buy on Instacart. Own the RecSys infrastructure that powers recommendations across all of them — collaborating with ML to optimize ranking algorithms at the scale of millions of daily sessions.
2020 — 2022
Instacart
Senior Engineering Manager
Led Retailer Storefront and Buy It Again — two high-leverage consumer surfaces focused on retention, repurchase, and the hard problem of making a vast catalog feel familiar.
2019 — 2020
Bright Machines
Senior Software Engineer — Cloud Platform
Designed and built the core definition service for a robotics platform. Full ownership from architecture to CI/CD, logging, telemetry, and integration testing.
2017 — 2019
Oracle
Principal Engineer — OCI Console
Built the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console and a component library used by 20+ internal teams. Also built a Java REST service bridging two identity federation systems.
2013 — 2017
Microsoft
SDE II — Azure Portal
Compute, Network, and Storage UX on surfaces responsible for over 50% of platform usage and 75% of Azure revenue. Excellence Award for enabling automated deployments on a legacy system that everyone else had given up on.
Tinkering
🤖
AI Agent Infrastructure
Exploring how AI agents can operate across messaging platforms with persistent memory, scheduled tasks, and ethical guardrails. What does a genuinely useful autonomous agent look like in practice?
TypeScript · Anthropic SDK · Containers
🧭
Ethics for Autonomous Systems
Working on a principled framework for how AI agents should reason about right action — grounded in Bahá'í values. Not alignment theory. A practical guide for systems that operate with real autonomy.
Python · AI Safety · Philosophy
🗺️
Taste Graph
A location-aware map of personally vetted places — food, coffee, shops — built as a prototype for what personalization looks like without crowd data. Each pin is a real judgment call.
Leaflet · Cloudflare · Personalization
📊
Portfolio Engine
Private investment dashboard with brokerage integration, tax-loss harvesting analysis, and Bogleheads-aligned rebalancing. Because I don't trust software I haven't read.
Cloudflare Workers · D1 · Plaid
I'm not looking.
But I'm always listening.

When the time is right, not when the market is loud. If you're building something that requires the kind of engineering leadership that comes from actually caring about the product, I'd like to hear about it.