Resume

This provides a concise summary of my professional experience.

Engineering Leader & Distributed Systems Architect

I am an empathetic, technically rigorous engineering leader and distributed systems architect with over 20 years of experience taking cloud, CI/CD, and data platforms from zero to scale. I pair high-level architectural strategy with daily, hands-on software engineering, translating complex business goals into scalable, full-stack systems and the internal developer platforms that empower teams to move faster.

Along the way, I have driven massive business impact, including delivering over $31M in cloud cost avoidance, and fostered inclusive, high-performing engineering cultures by mentoring infrastructure engineers into modern software roles.

Core Competencies

Leadership & Strategy

• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Mentorship & coaching, career pathing, onboarding program design ("Incubator"), technical upskilling.
• Technical Strategy & Roadmaps: Multi-quarter cross-functional roadmaps, technical direction, cross-functional alignment with product/executive stakeholders.
• Cloud FinOps & Cost Strategy: Infrastructure cost optimization, infrastructure lifecycle management, multi-tenant data pipelines.
• SRE & Reliability/Operations: Production incident response, SLI/SLO tracking, observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog), root-cause analysis (RCA).

Deep Technical Specialization

• Distributed Systems & Data Infrastructure: Multi-tenant storage, high-performance data ingestion pipelines, asynchronous processing, streaming architectures.
• Telemetry & Real-Time Analytics: Real-time analytics, read-model design, data collection engines, ClickHouse, BigQuery.
• Platform & Edge Engineering: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Cloud Run & Services, Cloudflare (Workers, edge/serverless compute, Durable Objects), Kubernetes (K8s), Terraform.

Technical Proficiencies

• Languages: Go (GoLang), Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL.
• Frameworks & DX: React, Next.js, Tailwind, Node.js, Gin, gRPC.
• Data & Storage: ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Kafka, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Cloudflare Durable Objects.
• Platform & Cloud: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Cloud Run & Services, Pub/Sub, AWS, S3, Cloudflare Workers.
• DevOps & Automation: Kubernetes (K8s), Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, Jenkins, Chef.

Professional Experience

Clerk

Senior Software Engineer (Full-Stack & Platform Reliability) | 2025 - 2026

Hands-on engineer driving the data and reliability behind Clerk's growth into the leading authentication & user management platform for builders.

• Architecture & Data Systems: Served as full-stack owner and data architect driving the product's user management, telemetry, and presentation layers; architected scalable backend data systems and streaming telemetry platforms to power secure, real-time insights for builders.
• Edge Architecture & Telemetry: Architected and implemented user activity tracking at the edge using Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects; led a team of engineers for its implementation, collaborating with product and executive leadership to develop and deploy.
• Frontend & Presentation: Engineered highly performant, customer-facing user management and presentation experiences utilizing Next.js and Tailwind.
• Production Reliability & Monitoring: Led a data reliability initiative to investigate root causes of complex dashboard errors; built and open-sourced a standalone ClickHouse monitoring service deployed via infrastructure-as-code to decouple system health from core application rollouts.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered across product and engineering streams to decompose complex real-time pipeline architectures into manageable milestones, eliminating dependency bottlenecks.

Target Corporation

Lead Engineer, Efficiency & Data Platforms | 2018 - 2025

Promoted to architect platforms providing data-driven insights into infrastructure cost, technical debt, and lifecycle management while leading and mentoring engineering teams.

• Engineering Leadership & Mentorship: Led and mentored a team of engineers, fostering an inclusive, high-performance culture. Designed onboarding programs ("Incubator") that accelerated the impact and growth of new engineers.
• Technical Strategy & Roadmap: Partnered with product, design, and executive stakeholders to define technical strategy for Target's Cloud FinOps practice. Owned the technical roadmap for data-driven insights platforms.
• Multi-Tenant Platform Architecture: Architected the "Infra Showback Hub" (ISH), a scalable, multi-tenant data platform (Go, BigQuery, Pub/Sub) designed to ingest, process, and analyze terabytes of operational telemetry and infrastructure data.
• Data Ingestion & Telemetry Engines: Led the development of Data Collection Engines (DCE) to reliably aggregate operational data across GCP, Kubernetes, and enterprise systems, serving as the foundational data source for downstream analytical frameworks.
• AI & Innovation Frameworks: Architected and mentored engineers in developing platforms utilizing LLMs and agentic AI to create a sophisticated recommendations framework for cost optimization, lifecycle management, and system reliability.
• Full-Stack & API Development: Guided full-stack development of multiple UIs and APIs (React/TypeScript, Go, PostgreSQL), leading hands-on code reviews and architectural decisions to ensure system scalability.
• Operational Excellence & SRE: Defined and executed SLI/SLO standards, established advanced monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), and acted as a primary escalation point for diagnosing critical platform outages and leading root-cause analyses.
• Business Impact: Drove technical efforts that identified and resulted in over $31M in cloud cost avoidance.

Lead Software Engineer, Infrastructure Data | 2015 - 2018

Pivoted to software leadership, building foundational data aggregation platforms and accelerating developer velocity.

• High-Performance Pipeline Orchestration: Co-designed and developed "avalanche-framework," a modular Go package that eliminated boilerplate and standardized data connectivity (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, GraphQL, Elasticsearch), API calls, authentication, and configuration for internal developers.
• Distributed Data Platform Development: Spearheaded the "Iceberg/Compass" initiative, building Target's core infrastructure data platform (Go, React, NoSQL, Kafka) to aggregate, process, and visualize data from disparate IT operations sources, successfully retiring legacy systems.
• DevOps & Infrastructure Best Practices: Implemented modern CI/CD pipelines (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes) and microservice/API-first development to support high-throughput data infrastructure.

Senior Systems Engineer, Infrastructure & Security | 2004 - 2015

Led infrastructure architecture, deployment, and operational support for mission-critical distributed systems.

• Enterprise Infrastructure & Stability: Led architecture, deployment, and operational support for mission-critical distributed systems, ensuring high availability, security, and compliance across 1,800+ enterprise environments.
• Enterprise Security & Compliance: Engineered and managed enterprise security platforms and ensured PCI/compliance for 45,000+ POS registers and kiosk systems.

Early Career Experience

• TEKSystems | Desktop Systems Architect (Contractor) | 2003 - 2004
• Prudential Financial | Lead Technical Engineer | 1996 - 2003

Education

• Associate of Arts - North Hennepin Community College
• Completed credits towards a Bachelor of Science in Business/E-Business, University of Phoenix

View my detailed project history & body of work ->