Experience

15 years leading engineering teams at early- and growth-stage startups. Scaled organizations from 1 to 50+ engineers, led distributed teams across product, infrastructure, and data science, and built the hiring, career, and compensation frameworks that persist as the org scales.

VP Engineering | Tidelift | 2022—2025
Tidelift helps security-conscious companies manage the security of their open-source software supply chain by building direct relationships with open source maintainers and ensuring they are compensated for the work they do to keep their packages secure and reliable.

Led engineering organization (grown from 9 to 15) for enterprise open-source supply-chain security platform. Member of operational leadership team.

  • Shipped core platform capabilities including IDE integration, CVE alerting, TACOS attestation for government compliance, enterprise reporting, and automated data collection.
  • Established engineering metrics and SLOs: moved deploy frequency from a few times per week to several times per day, cut lead time from months to weeks, and drove meaningful reductions in customer-facing incidents.
  • Built company's first data warehouse and BI infrastructure, adopted across product, sales, marketing, finance, and operations; invalidated operating assumptions and reshaped cross-functional decision-making.
  • Created behavioral career ladders adopted organization-wide as the model for other departments.
VP Engineering | Crystal Knows | 2021—2022
Crystal Knows provides DISC-based personality predictions and assessments to help you lead, hire, and sell.

Scaled engineering organization from 1 to 7 across engineering, data science, and infrastructure.

  • Rebuilt ML framework for personality classification from text features (classical ML, not LLM-based), raising accuracy substantially above the prior baseline and generating the confidence data needed to support customer-facing claims.
  • Migrated from ad-hoc AWS to Terraform + Kubernetes IaC; cut deploy time from ~20 minutes to ~3 minutes, enabled continuous delivery, and established a production-consistent staging environment.
Senior Engineering Manager | Marqeta | 2020—2021
Marqeta pioneered modern card issuing through API-first functionality and just-in-time processing for Square, Doordash, Expensify, and others.

Led 9-person team responsible for card fulfillment and processing at the leading card-issuing and payment-processing platform.

  • Designed new card-provider integration framework, reducing partner onboarding from ~3 months (TPM-heavy) to ~10 calendar days and increasing capacity from 1–2 integrations per quarter to 8+.
  • Led monolith decomposition for card fulfillment services, breaking a 6-week critical-path deploy cycle and establishing the microservices patterns adopted by other teams.
  • Doubled team velocity (6→14 points/sprint) via improved branching strategy, expanded test automation, and reduced manual QA; shifted team culture from "nervous to deploy" to routine deploys.
  • Championed company-wide engineering documentation standard, driving ~90% adoption across ~100+ engineers.
Senior Engineering Manager | Auth0 | 2019—2020
Auth0 (since acquired by Okta) provides easy to implement and widely compatible authentication and authorization as a service.

Led 15-person engineering organization across IAM, User Management, and Continuous Authentication. Company later acquired by Okta for $6.5B.

  • Turned around an overwhelmed user-management team stuck in reactive incident firefighting: reinstated planning and roadmap delivery, reduced incident backlog, and restored the team's ability to ship.
  • Led teams shipping continuous authentication and bot-injection defense; directly responsible for auth security readiness for the Quibi launch.
  • Hired 3 of 6 new engineers from underrepresented backgrounds, all retained past tenure.
Director of Engineering | GitLab | 2018—2019
GitLab provides a modern, all-in-one DevOps solution as a SaaS or self-managed solution.

Led backend engineering for the "Dev" stages of the GitLab product during the company's rapid-scaling phase.

  • Grew backend engineering organization from 23 to 86 over one year.
  • Led research and advocacy that adjusted compensation multipliers within the company's rent-index formula; reduced a 40% offer decline rate and restored hiring competitiveness in US and EU markets.
  • Built and ran manager training program for ~25 newly-promoted engineering managers, establishing managerial norms that persisted through continued scaling.
  • Led Gitaly project replacing NFS-based Git storage on gitlab.com, eliminating downtime events where customers experienced minutes of failed Git requests before automated detection.
VP Engineering | Treehouse | 2015—2018
Engineering Manager | 2013—2015
Software Engineer | 2012—2013
Treehouse is an online school that provides high-quality training material for people who are interested in breaking into a technical career.

Joined as first engineering hire; grew organization to ~50 across web, mobile, infrastructure, data science, and product design for online technical-education platform.

  • Built and shipped containerized code-execution framework for live in-browser coding exercises, predating Docker and using a custom EC2 pool, at a time when competitors relied on multiple-choice questions or async file upload.
  • Built company's first data pipeline and warehouse, adopted across product, sales, marketing, finance, and operations as the foundation for cross-functional decision-making.
  • Shifted product experimentation from serial, guess-driven launches to parallel, systematic A/B testing; reduced experiment failure rate by 60% and substantially increased learning velocity.
  • Created engineering org structure, career frameworks, and compensation philosophy from scratch; supported scaling from 1 to 50 engineers through the company's primary growth phase.

Technical Skills

  • Languages: Ruby/Rails, Node.js, Go, Java, TypeScript/React
  • Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, PostgreSQL, CI/CD, Service-Oriented Architecture

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Furman University
Greenville, SC