Summary
Engineering leader with 10+ years of experience building the platforms, teams, and operating models that let engineering organizations ship fast and scale sustainably. Currently a Senior Manager at Cedar running platform and data engineering — 11 engineers across two teams — where I built data engineering as a function from nothing, trained a new manager and developed three tech leads from ICs, and made the hard calls on people, vendors, and architecture that kept a lean team delivering outsized impact. I've navigated a RIF that cut my org in half and rebuilt it, maintained a high-performing organization through coaching, talent development, and performance management, and championed the promotions that rewarded the right people. Before Cedar I was a platform engineer at Capital One shipping developer automation at enterprise scale. I thrive in high-ambiguity, resource-constrained environments where judgment matters more than headcount — build vs. buy, standardize vs. enable, invest vs. cut — and I'm looking for a path to director where I can help a growing organization mature its engineering culture and multiply its impact through AI-enabled, lean teams.
Experience
Cedar
Grew from individual tech lead to senior manager of 11 engineers across platform and data engineering, reporting directly to the CTO. Built new functions, rebuilt teams after a RIF, and developed the next generation of engineering leaders. Partner directly with product and infrastructure leadership and own the roadmap for how every engineer at Cedar ships, tests, releases, and analyzes data.
Senior Manager, Platform Engineering & Data Engineering
New York, NY
06/2024 - Current
Manager, Platform Engineering
New York, NY
12/2022 - 06/2024
Tech Lead, Platform Engineering
New York, NY
12/2021 - 12/2022
Leadership and Org Building
- Org Planning: Grew from individual tech lead to senior manager through three promotions in three years, scaling scope from technical execution to multi-team strategy and org design. Designed and orchestrated a reorganization that recombined application platform and infrastructure under a single umbrella, then restructured the teams as Platform SOA and Platform Testing — aligned directly around company imperatives. Following the reorg, reported directly to the CTO. Set multi-quarter strategy, translated it into team-level OKRs and staffing plans, and managed cross-team dependencies with product, infrastructure, and security leadership.
- Team Building: Built the data engineering function from the ground up — defined the charter, hired the team, set the architecture, and established governance in a HIPAA-regulated environment. Took it from zero to 40+ pipelines and 500+ dbt models serving every team at Cedar. Ran hiring end-to-end for four roles — wrote job descriptions, designed interview loops, screened candidates, and closed offers for three of them. Following a RIF that eliminated 50% of the platform organization — including the entire on-call rotation — rebuilt the rotation from scratch and systematically drove down alert and ticket volume.
- Talent Development: Trained a new engineering manager, providing coaching on 1:1s, feedback delivery, performance management, and stakeholder communication. Developed three individual contributors into tech leads, giving them increasing scope and autonomy to scale leadership capacity across the org. Promoted two engineers from P3 to S1 by identifying their potential early and creating the conditions for them to succeed: one championed the DAL pattern adopted company-wide; the other built the business case for dbt, gained cross-org buy-in, and led the migration.
- Performance Management: Maintained a high-performing engineering organization through coaching, talent development, and performance management. Navigated a range of situations requiring different judgment: coached a strong-effort senior through a development plan who ultimately decided to leave on good terms; built a data-driven performance case for a staff engineer who had fallen through the cracks under prior managers; addressed the complexity of a staff engineer promoted too early by a previous manager; and supported a burned-out staff engineer with 6 years of tenure through a transition.
Strategy, Process, and Vendor Management
Set technical direction, established team operating rhythms, and managed vendor relationships — balancing engineering investment against organizational constraints and team capacity.
- Strategy: Championed the DAL pattern as a strategic architectural investment, backing the engineer who proposed it. Replaced unrestricted direct model access that had created tight coupling, duplicated queries, and unclear ownership boundaries across Cedar's codebase. This decision formalized domain logic, improved performance, and began decoupling from the ORM.
- Team Process: Established the team's operating cadence: quarterly planning, Jira-based work tracking, and a weekly cross-functional platform ops call spanning infrastructure, app platform, data engineering, security, and IT. Ran platform partnership and stakeholder meetings for testing and SOA initiatives. Defined team ceremonies and authored team charter documents to codify operating norms and expectations.
- Vendor Management: Made the call to end the relationship with Harness (release platform) after nearly a year of working with them to fix stability issues — saving $180K/year. Drove the build-vs-buy decision on flaky test infrastructure, ultimately leveraging Datadog's flaky test monitoring over custom tooling. Owned the AWS vendor relationship and saved $20K/month by restructuring savings plans.
Delivery and Impact
Drove measurable improvements across release reliability, CI performance, platform stability, test environments, data infrastructure, and SOA enablement — the foundational capabilities that every product team at Cedar depends on to ship.
- Release: Transformed a release process with 50% success rate and 3-hour duration into one that runs in under 30 minutes with consistent multi-daily releases. Introduced migration linting to block problematic database migrations, fixed flaky infrastructure workers, and drove the CI/CD migration from Jenkins to GitHub Actions.
- Testing: Inherited 200+ flaky tests and 2+ hour CI. Led the unittest-to-pytest migration, implemented Datadog quarantining, built AI-assisted flaky test detection and repair, remediated randomness in model factories, and built a cross-team ownership system so flaky tests got fixed instead of abandoned.
- Reliability: Reduced after-hours pages by 10x through systematic monitor tuning and investment in platform stability.
- Environments: Transformed enclave (RED-data-safe) test environments from 1+ day manual creation to automated provisioning in minutes. Cut deployment time from 90 to 20 minutes. Navigated legal and compliance requirements for outbound communications in RED-data environments. Added self-service production-scale infrastructure provisioning for data integration testing and automated production snapshot restoration to enclaves.
- Data Platform: Replaced bespoke SQLAlchemy and Django ORM data pipelines with Snowflake + dbt, scaling to 40+ pipelines and 500+ models. Rolled out Open Metadata for data catalog, lineage, certifications, ownership, and medallion architecture classification. Delivered the data foundation for client billing and implemented a Stripe pipeline that captured $300K+ in previously missed platform fees.
- SOA Enablement: Enabled Cedar's monolith-to-SOA migration by building a repository management system, overhauling CI patterns including shared GitHub Actions for secure deployments, and creating both application and service cookiecutters.
- Observability: Managed the Datadog rollout and observability strategy across Cedar's platform — metrics, traces, performance monitoring, and session replay with product analytics.
Capital One
Platform Software Engineer for Enterprise Account Servicing Experience (EASE).
Principal Associate, Senior Software Engineer
Richmond, VA | New York, NY
07/2020 - 12/2021
Senior Associate, Software Engineer
Richmond, VA
07/2018 - 07/2020
Developer Automation Tooling
Owned and maintained a set of developer automation tools that increased pull request throughput, decreased intent cycle time, and supported enterprise compliance. Developed all bots in Typescript using GitHub, Slack, and Jira SDKs. Deployed to AWS using ALB and Lambda.
- Updater Bot and Automerge Bot: Created a pair of bots that coordinate to update and merge each approved pull request. This tool enabled the organization to simultaneously maintain a high merge velocity and linear commit history on the main branch in the EASE Web monorepo. To date the tool has merged more than 15,000 pull requests and saved more than 60,000 hours of developer time.
- Multimerge Bot: Designed and developed a multimerge solution for EASE Web that merges multiple pull requests simultaneously in order to further accelerate pull request velocity and align the contribution model with EASE iOS and Android.
Muster
Software Engineer at a grassroots advocacy startup.
Software Engineer
Richmond, VA
04/2016 - 07/2018
Legislator.io
Startup founder, attempted to lower access barriers to legal aid services for low income residents using software.
Founder
Richmond, VA
06/2014 - 04/2016
Education & Certifications
Certified Secure Software Engineer
Secure Code Warrior Level 2
Online
11/2020
Evaluates an engineer's ability to identify and remediate OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Associate Level
Online
06/2020
The Solutions Architect Exam tests an individual's ability to develop highly available, cost-efficient, and scalable systems on AWS Cloud Services.
Legal Aid Justice Center
Intern
Charlottesville, VA
09/2013 - 05/2014
The Legal Aid Justice Center advocates on behalf of under-privileged communities and their members to help create a more just society.
University of Virginia
Bachelor of Arts
Charlottesville, VA
08/2010 - 05/2014
Undergraduate degree, dual major in Philosophy and Government.