Software engineer with 25+ years of experience bridging academic research and industry — from scientific visualization and VR at the Cornell Program of Computer Graphics and the University of Michigan 3D Lab, to cloud infrastructure, networking firmware, and data engineering at Datto and Measures for Justice. Effective as both a deep individual contributor and a technical leader, with a track record of shipping production systems at scale across diverse stacks and domains.
Skills
General Skills
project management, consulting, leadership, software / system design, algorithms / data structures, Agile development (Scrum certified)
Programming Languages
Python, JavaScript, PHP, Go, Java/Scala/Kotlin, C/C++; familiar: R
Co-led Pit Crew data engineering squad as tech lead; drove roadmap planning, sprint ceremonies, and cross-functional discoveries with product and research partners
Significantly optimized Codot (charge-coding tool): optimized API layer to handle increased data volume and added indexes, achieving a 220× throughput improvement and cutting endpoint response times from hours to seconds; executed migration of 840,000 records (97% of dataset) from legacy system
Co-designed vault architecture improvements — standardizing agency ID format, removing column tags, and replacing per-agency local vaults with global agency vaults — paving the way for a subsequent R-native interface implemented by the team
Developed researcher-facing pipeline configuration UI, reducing the engineering bottleneck for vault coding setup
Implemented Unbox Taxonomy: replaced convoluted state-based data storage with agency ID-based storage, building on the agency ID standardization from the vault architecture redesign
Established QA strategy, roadmap, and priorities for internal tools (Codot, Unbox, Theseus) — covering release plans, API test suites, and manual regression plans; coordinated team execution and sunset unused tools
Contributed to planning and scoping for R standardization of five agency data pipelines
Established SME ownership model and Show & Tell sessions for the squad; sustained one of the highest squad health scores org-wide
The SaaS Protection team creates and maintains a data backup & recovery system for cloud-based business productivity tools, such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
Developed software for a highly available, large-scale cloud environment with over 3400 servers capable to backup data in the exabyte range.
Started in sustaining team to work on urgent bugs and production issues. Strong collaboration with tech support, problem management, and on-call.
Moved to scrum team and worked on full stack tickets, such as cold archival and reports / notifications. Recently working on creating a new micro service for customer alerting.
Co-led an agile guild initiative to address problems with customer migrations and data replications. We prioritized and worked on bug fixes, new alerts, and process changes to increase robustness and reduce on-call load.
Interviewed potential new engineers and helped with training.
Designed and implemented a prototype for data breach alerting based on anomaly detection of access patterns using Python and PostgreSQL. The system would learn from previous data access patterns and adapt to changes in behavior over time.
Worked on multiple products in the Datto router, switch, and WiFi access points portfolio. The devices are cloud-managed (web configurable) and my responsibilities had an emphasis on firmware development, but also full-stack development. Datto strongly values Agile development and automated testing.
Ported early builds of the DNA edge router to use the OpenWrt / Lede SDK, implementing a service based architecture in PHP, C, and native OpenWrt scripting.
Contributed to the embedded Linux firmware of the devices, including long-term projects like the integration of router based web content filtering, intrusion detection / prevention, VPN, and remote access (rly).
Implemented several product features to enable seamless configuration of networking devices from cloud based management interfaces using a variety of technologies. This was composed of new and legacy components using JavaScript, MySQL, Phinx database migrations, Redis, Symfony framework for PHP, as well as Go/Golang for newer backend services.
Actively participated in college recruiting; delivered tech talks to diverse audiences, interviewed hundreds at college job fairs, and worked closely with interns on dev teams.
Creation of Apidae, a highly scalable, cloud-based computational engine that conducts high-performance simulation of energy models of buildings.
Apidae allows users to run thousands of simulations concurrently, offers special statistical and parametric search algorithms, and visualizes the results with interactive charts.
Core team member responsible for all project aspects including:
designing the system; creating install scripts for the cloud instances and maintaining the development virtual machines (VM); creating database schemas and queries for metadata and high-level results;
processing of simulation results and visualizing them; and managing sensor / weather data.
Co-lead designer/programmer of the Sustain framework for the Sustainable Energy Project (100k lines of Java code)
Supported Cornell faculty with their research and advised graduate and undergraduate students
Integrated cluster and cloud computing to create a flexible computational environment
Created wired and wireless sensor networks to log data (like temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and ambient light), stored data in databases, and made data accessible on web servers
Prototyped advanced human-computer interfaces, including 3D projection systems and 3D gesture recognition using depth-sensors (Kinect);
built a multi-touch table interface; and reverse engineered a digital drafting table
University of Michigan - UM3D Lab
Research Computer Specialist (formerly Programmer Analyst II)
Ann Arbor, MI March 1999 - September 2008
Led the University of Michigan 3D Lab as lab manager, collaborating with faculty and students on scientific visualization and virtual reality research
Contributed to externally-funded projects including the NSF-funded Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, CDC-funded Virtual Disaster Simulator, and Virtual Football Trainer