Engineering leader for the work that has to be right.
When 911 dispatchers route an emergency, they use software my teams at Mark43 built. That's the bar.
I've spent two decades building and leading engineering teams behind systems that don't get a second chance. Public safety, fintech, healthcare, govtech. CISSP. Force multiplier for organizations that can't afford to get it wrong.
Previously
Microsoft · Volvo · Mark43 · BetterPet · Old Well Labs
Lead case study
Mark43. Software for the worst day of someone's life.
When a 911 call comes in, the dispatcher's screen is the first link in the chain that gets help to a person in trouble. The software has to load. It has to route. It has to be right.
I spent five years at Mark43 building the engineering teams behind exactly that system. I joined as a senior engineer in 2018 and left as Director of Engineering at the start of 2023.
Along the way I led the team behind the real-time computer-aided dispatch product used by emergency communications centers, ran the team building the jail management system used by custody operations, and oversaw the geospatial infrastructure that tracked vehicles and officers in near-real-time so dispatchers knew who was closest to the call.
The work taught me what must work actually means at a systems level. There is no maintenance window when the call comes in. There is no "we'll fix it next sprint" when a deputy needs a records check at 2 a.m. The discipline of building for that bar is the lens I bring to every system since. Observability. On-call rigor. Deployment safety. The way you write tests when failure is not abstract.
The pattern
Twenty years of trusted-with-the-hard-stuff.
- 2024–Present
Concurrent engineering leadership
CTO, Head of Engineering, Advisor
Currently CTO at SovereignKey (seed-stage fintech, Dallas) and Head of Engineering at RevMAC (medical billing platform). Board advisor at Dexterity (legal tech). Operating across three regulated domains (financial, medical, and legal), concurrent with the GovWorx seat.
- Fintech
- Healthtech
- Legaltech
- 2026–Present
GovWorx
Head of Realtime Engineering
First Engineering Manager. Building the team and the realtime platform for govtech, where compliance is the floor, not a feature.
- Govtech
- Realtime
- AI
- 2025–2026
Old Well Labs
Staff Engineer
A deliberate, six-month pivot to staff-level IC to internalize AI tooling at implementation depth. Returned to engineering leadership AI-fluent and sharper.
- Fintech
- AI
- 2023–2025
BetterPet
Head of Engineering
Built the internal engineering org from 0 to 60. Replatformed the core product. MTBF roughly tripled, $4M/yr saved. During my 2.5-year tenure the business grew revenue 200%.
- Regulated SaaS
- Scale
- 2018–2023
Mark43
Senior Engineer → Director of Engineering
Five years building the teams behind real-time 911 dispatch, custody systems, and geospatial infrastructure used by law enforcement nationwide.
- Public Safety
- 2014–2018
Diligent, Red Ventures, AvidXchange
Sr Engineer / Security Architect
The CISSP backbone. Application security architecture for fintech and high-traffic consumer platforms.
- Security
- Fintech
- 2005–2014
Microsoft, Volvo
Senior Engineer / Tech Lead
Fortune 100 enterprise scale. Microsoft's support authoring platform. Volvo's common web platform across internal and external sites.
- Enterprise
Philosophy
On AI
I lead humans. I manage resources. AI is a resource.
AI is a tool. Powerful, fast, and useful. It is not a person. It is not accountable. And it is not the engineer.
When the model writes the code, the human is still the one who shipped it. When the model misses a security flaw, the human is still the one whose system got breached. When the model gets it wrong, the human is still the one on the call with the customer.
I lead engineering teams that use AI heavily and ship faster because of it. I also lead teams that own every outcome that ships. Those two things are not in tension. They are the same discipline.
"The model did it" is not a defense. It is an abdication. In every system I have led, the human is the arbiter of truth and the one on the hook when something breaks. That is the bar I hire to, the bar I review to, and the bar I expect my leadership to model.
What I'm looking for
Leadership of a team of teams. CTO, VP of Engineering, or SVP Engineering.
The work I do best is in environments where getting it wrong has consequences. Regulated industries (HIPAA, PCI, SEC). Security-critical systems. Public-trust software. Companies between Series A and pre-IPO, where the engineering org is large enough that the leverage is in how teams interact, not in any one feature ship.
If that is your stage and your bar, let's talk.
Start here
Four essays that say what I think.
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AI Doesn't Know When to Stop
On the alignment problem from twenty years of building systems that fail safely.
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One Commit at a Time
Engineering culture as something versioned over time, not declared.
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Why Your Sensitive Audio Data Deserves Local Transcription
Regulated-systems thinking applied to a concrete build.
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Abstract Guilds of Craftsmen
A 2017 piece on the cultural shape of an engineering org. Still holds up.
Selected code
Recent projects.
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email-ready
Email-security health checker for businesses and IT teams. Two CLIs, one codebase: plain-English risk language for owners, hardened diagnostics for security teams. The translation problem at the heart of every CISO conversation.
Python
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blindrop-crypto
Zero-knowledge encryption and atomic-operation patterns for secure secret sharing. The primitives I reach for when designing systems that cannot trust their own server.
TypeScript
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transcription
Production-ready local transcription service on OpenAI Whisper. Async jobs, model pooling, REST API. The implementation behind the argument that sensitive audio should never leave your servers.
Python
-
sky-may-fall
Multi-region production weather app. NWS, Open-Meteo, Ecowitt PWS. React 19, TypeScript strict, Express 5, Redis cache, Docker + Nginx + Let's Encrypt deploy. Five languages. The deployed evidence that I still ship at the keyboard.
TypeScript
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sky-forge
Drone-mapping toolkit for orthomosaics, 3D models, and terrain maps from aerial imagery. Flight planning across six drone profiles, OpenDroneMap processing pipeline, web tile viewer. Built for a side interest. Shipped to the same bar.
Python
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bitrot-lab
A hands-on lab on what files actually are at the byte level. Magic numbers, safe corruption, hex editors. What I run for engineers who want to see beneath the abstraction.
Python