I’m a Principal Software Engineer based in the Greater Chicago area, focused on platform infrastructure and developer tooling that lets engineering teams move fast without breaking things — building cloud-native systems for multi-team engineering organizations.

Background

My path into software was unconventional. I started as a Technical Artist at Volition / THQ in Champaign, IL — building Python tools, pipeline automation, and camera shaders for Saints Row 2 and Red Faction: Guerrilla. That early focus on building tools for other creators still shapes how I approach platform work today — I think of engineers as my primary users.

After game dev, I moved into web development and spent a decade growing through the stack — from feature work on ad operations platforms to leading platform infrastructure for a 30-engineer organization.

What I Do

I work at the intersection of infrastructure, developer experience, and architecture. Most recently at Basis Technologies, I:

  • Designed and led an on-demand full-stack test environment system on AWS EKS — reduced setup from days-to-weeks down to 3–4 hours, scaled to 50–60 concurrent environments, and enabled teams to run parallel feature and integration testing without blocking shared environments
  • Authored the company-wide CI/CD pipeline standard adopted across engineering — a 14-stage pipeline with Docker multi-stage builds, semantic versioning, and three deployment modes, replacing ad-hoc pipeline configurations across the organization
  • Built and maintained the Kubernetes platform that runs product services, data pipelines, and developer tooling for the full engineering organization

How I Work

I believe the job of platform engineering is to disappear — to build systems so reliable and easy to use that product teams stop thinking about infrastructure and start thinking about problems.

I care about documentation, naming things well, and making systems legible to the engineers who depend on them. I’ve led bootcamps, written internal standards, and mentored engineers because I think building good teams is as important as building good systems.

I work closely with product and team leads to make sure platform investments line up with real bottlenecks in delivery.

I’m drawn to problems at the edge of “this is how we’ve always done it.” Those are the places where questioning the constraint leads to a 10x improvement rather than an incremental one.

Outside Work

I’ve been exploring AI/LLM agent workflows as a serious development tool. My open-source Diagram Builder — a tool that turns TypeScript codebases into interactive 3D dependency graphs using React, Three.js, and Neo4j — was built primarily through agent-driven development with Claude and the Anthropic SDK.

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