Engineering leader for the work that has to be right.
When 911 dispatchers route an emergency, they use software my team 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.
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.
- 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, time-bounded 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. 300% reliability improvement, $4M/yr saved, 200% revenue growth in 2.5 years.
- 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, SVP Engineering, or Director where the role shape is genuinely multi-team rather than a single squad with a manager title.
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 roughly Series B and post-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.