Engineering Leadership

I lead teams of software engineers, UX developers, and QA engineers across multiple client projects at once. The people are often senior and have strong opinions, which means the job is as much about trust and judgment as it is about delivery. I try to understand what each person needs, give them honest feedback, and balance what's good for them against what the business needs. That balance is the hardest part of the job and the part I care about most.

Right now I'm the only engineering leader on staff, so I do both jobs: running the department and managing every engineer directly. Regular 1:1s, performance reviews, mentoring, promotions. I'd rather build a culture where people give each other honest feedback directly than one where everything has to go through me.

I'm also on the business side: leading client calls, writing proposals, and helping close and extend engagements. I own the department's budget, tooling, OKRs, and recruiting (from writing the job posting to making the hire). I was promoted to Engineering Manager in 2021, Senior Engineering Manager in 2024, and Director in 2025.

My job on these engagements is to keep delivery on track, manage the client relationship, make staffing calls, and have the hard conversations, on both sides, when things get complicated.

Below are a few of the engagements I've been responsible for overseeing:

• Apple · multiple public and internal tools. Ongoing engagement across several workstreams.
• Kamana (aquired by Triage) · healthcare staffing platform. The product more than doubled its user base and annual recurring revenue during the engagement.
• Prowler · cloud security. An open-source tool turned SaaS MVP that helped close its first major customer and secure a new funding round.
• iAsk · AI answer engine. Stripe-backed subscriptions and a paywall on an Elixir backend as the product scaled to 1.5 million daily searches.
• Symbolic.ai · AI prompt generation platform. A real-time, multiplayer tool built in Elixir and LiveView on a tight timeline to capitalize on early momentum with industry executives.
• Level All · college and career readiness platform. Tools helping students navigate pathways from high school through higher education and into careers.
• Youth, Inc. · youth sports platform. A registration, scheduling, and management system for youth sports organizations.

I also spent a lot of time building things for the department itself.

• Recruiting Intelligence App

  Without a dedicated recruiter, opening an engineering position meant having to review hundreds of applicants by hand. A single posting could generate 300 applications in the first 24 hours, and each one took 5 to 10 minutes to evaluate: reading resumes, checking LinkedIn profiles, GitHub accounts, and portfolios, and watching for the fraud and scam tactics that have become widespread in engineering hiring.

  I built an application that integrates with BambooHR's ATS and uses both Anthropic and OpenAI models to score candidates in two dimensions. The first is a fit score that evaluates experience, skills, and relevance against the job description, surfacing candidates who applied to an Elixir role without any Elixir experience, for example. The second is a fraud and scam detection layer, built on extensive research into current tactics like keyword stuffing, fabricated identities, AI-generated resumes, and unverifiable claims. Each flag gets a severity rating and evidence. Candidates can be bulk-scored, reviewed, and disqualified, syncing directly back to BambooHR.

  It's saved a huge amount of time and lets me focus on the candidates who are actually worth talking to.

• Tech Lead Guide

  I interviewed current and former tech leads and wrote a three-part guide for the role at DockYard. It covers what to expect before taking on the role (day-to-day breakdown, time allocation across coding, DevOps, planning, and team support), how to operate once in it (embodying the firm's guiding principles, collaborating with other discipline leads, navigating ambiguous responsibilities, and working directly with clients), and a curated set of resources for continued growth. Tech leads at a consultancy face different challenges than those at product companies, and the existing role description wasn't enough to prepare people for the reality of the job.

• Standardized Architectural Reviews

  I wrote a guide that standardized how we run architectural reviews for clients. It defines a repeatable structure: objective and scope framing, stakeholder mapping, analysis organized by software quality attributes (maintainability, scalability, security, performance), findings with business-impact and level-of-effort ratings, a summary with prioritized recommendations, and appendices for references and tooling. The guide includes detailed instructions for each section, example language drawn from real engagements, and completed reviews as templates. Engagements that used it consistently delivered better work.

• Roles and Competencies Matrix

  Led the revision of the engineering career ladder and created a new role, the Architect and Team Support Engineer, defining what it does and how it fits into engagements.

The work this role actually involved: