Profile
Senior Software Engineer and former startup CTO with 15+ years architecting and scaling production systems end-to-end - from event-sourced backends to cross-platform mobile and web. Sole technical leader for a startup through multiple pivots, sustaining 99.9%+ uptime across 8+ years while growing an engineering team from fresh graduates into seniors. Polyglot across a dozen+ languages, comfortable owning systems from architecture through deployment.
Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Espresso Systems | Remote
January 2024 - Present
- Architected and built front-end, back-end, and integration solutions for Block Explorer, Node Validator Dashboard, and Delegation UI
- Built front-end for "Infinite Garden" marketing campaign
- Selected by supervisor as code-quality champion, tasked with driving codebase quality standards across the engineering team
- Performed code reviews across the engineering team, providing architecture and implementation guidance
- Advised on system designs via cross-team architecture brainstorming, driving toward low-maintenance, self-sustaining systems
- Collaborated consistently across time zones with a distributed, partly off-shore engineering team, coordinating work via Asana, Notion, and GitHub, with day-to-day communication over Slack and Zulip
- Identified a Merkle tree storage scaling issue within first week on the job - growing exponentially instead of logarithmically - preventing it from becoming a production-scale bottleneck
- Diagnosed a mutex deadlock in Rust code causing severe performance freezes by code inspection alone, then wrote a regression test to reliably reproduce it
Chief Technology Officer
addmi inc | Albuquerque, NM
March 2015 - December 2023
- Owned all technical strategy and architecture decisions as sole CTO across multiple product pivots
- Maintained 99.9%+ uptime across 8+ years of critical production systems, with under 48 total hours of downtime and minimal, largely recoverable data loss
- Led and mentored a dozen engineers over the years, turning fresh graduates into seniors
- Coordinated team workflow and priorities using Trello, occasionally collaborating with engineers across time zones
- Taught fresh graduates core concepts including functional programming, event sourcing, and linear algebra for SVG/Canvas/Path rendering and layout
- Architected Event Sourcing based solution for database storage and retrieval, allowing for distributed computation and reproducible / auditable modification tracking
- Designed and tested libraries for precise multi-currency money representation and allocation, avoiding floating-point arithmetic entirely
- Architected an OAuth2 microservice to centralize third-party authentication, eliminating dependency on multiple brittle third-party auth integrations
- Built a bespoke reservation system for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, preventing RV slot overselling for the event
- Migrated database persistent storage systems from Firebase/Firestore (NoSQL document database) to a relational database
- Built a multi-channel notification routing layer atop Firebase Functions delivering Email, SMS (Twilio), FCM push, APNs push, and in-app feed notifications
- Built a custom scheduled-job system for atomic job acquisition modeled after firebase-queue; later migrated both onto Firebase hooks, removing the need for dedicated server infrastructure
- Used RabbitMQ as the message queue backbone for asynchronous processing pipelines
- Implemented geohashing-based proximity matching on Firebase Realtime Database to determine when users were near each other
- Managed infrastructure via Docker Swarm before migrating to Kubernetes with automatic scaling, running lean and cost-efficient while sustaining strong performance
- Built CI/CD pipelines for internal library targets using AWS CodeBuild, publishing artifacts to a private npm registry via AWS CodeArtifact
- Integrated Tesseract OCR to scan and extract text content from documents
- Architected Flutter cross-platform application with localization and responsiveness, hand-rendering custom UI components via manual path/canvas drawing when native primitives fell short of design requirements
- Built a hot-swappable localization system for the POS system, supporting gettext .po and Dart/Flutter ARB formats interchangeably
- Wrote a custom Golang parser for gettext .po files
- Integrated Google Translate API to automate draft translations for new locale content
- Implemented HTTP `Language` header content negotiation on addmi.com, serving content in the visitor's preferred language
- Implemented a custom locale-aware list formatter following standard pluralization/list-formatting conventions
- Wrote a custom gettext string extractor for Vue.js templates after the vue-gettext plugin proved unreliable on modern JavaScript, mishandling template literals, regular expressions, and comments
- Wrote a converter between the ARB and gettext .po localization formats
- Leveraged Localise and other third-party translation services to curate custom translations
- Integrated multiple third-party hardware SDKs and software vendors into production systems with negligible performance impact
- Maintained and modernized legacy systems originally built in-house, replacing them with updated versions while preserving backwards compatibility
- Conducted technical interviews and provided hiring recommendations for engineering candidates
- Implemented SEO-compliant structured data using application/ld+json schema annotations, improving site discoverability
Senior Programmer
Lavu Inc. | Albuquerque, NM
September 2012 - September 2015
- Built a generic, white-label POS system enabling remote ordering and a web presence for businesses, work later carried forward into next role
- Integrated a payment processor into the platform
- Resurrected a non-functional iOS application to fully working state, fixing numerous underlying issues
- Built an entirely new reporting system using a JavaScript charting library
- Enabled online ordering for numerous restaurant vendors on the platform
- Established code guidelines adopted across the engineering team
- Led transition from ad-hoc workflows to version-controlled development
- Mentored new hires into effective, independent programmers
Website Programming / Development
Gamers Anonymous | Remote
June 2011 - December 2012
- Rebuilt local business website, enabling owner to self-manage promotional banners without developer support
Operations Reporting Analyst
Sitel | Albuquerque, NM
January 2005 - September 2012
- Diagnosed and repaired a broken VBA macro application supporting in-game chat support operations for Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft account
- Engineered a file-based chat system using shared network-drive polling as a message bus, working around an environment with no direct computer-to-computer networking
- Built VBA-driven Excel automation to pull, populate, and calculate campaign performance reporting across multiple accounts
- Recognized facility-wide for Excel/VBA expertise, extending reporting support across additional campaigns (Tivo, Starbucks, DirecTV, Choice Hotels)
Education
Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science
University of New Mexico | Albuquerque, NM
January 2010 - May 2013
Wrote own software based rasterizer. Took course on functional programming implementations of Digital Image Processing learning about Kernel Convolutions.