Oct 2024 – Feb 2025 · 4 mos

• Stepped into the role after OSPO was dissolved, leading reorg efforts to integrate open source, core engineering, and SRE practices. Left behind a structured plan to improve long-term reliability and operational ownership.
• Formalized a long-term roadmap for enterprise MySQL functionality, leading to immediate and positive customer feedback and earning an org-wide kudos for leadership impact (presented during company townhall).

Mar 2023 – Oct 2024 · 1 yr 7 mos

• Servant leader for a highly skilled team of open source engineers, including Apache PMC and OpenSearch LC members. Focused on maximizing upstream impact while balancing corporate objectives, fostering a culture of meaningful contribution to FOSS projects.
• Advised on corporate open source strategy and governance initiatives, proposing best practices for licensing, security, and compliance. Advocated for sustainable OSS participation, shaping internal processes for foundation engagement, vulnerability response, and long-term maintainability.

Nov 2021 – Mar 2023 · 1 yr 4 mos

• Led a high-performing SRE team (AMER), overseeing 90,000+ cloud servers while acting as a servant leader; supporting, coaching, and advocating for the team to maintain morale amid intense critical-path responsibilities.
• Formalized incident management and postmortem processes, improving Aiven’s on-call operations and production resilience.

Mar 2021 – Oct 2021 · 7 mos · Toronto, Ontario, Canada

• Redesigned engineering decision-making processes, introducing shift-left practices, Team Topologies, and DDD to improve workflow efficiency and accelerate development velocity. Led the transformation from Trello to Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse), implementing scalable work-tracking and prioritization frameworks for better cross-functional collaboration.
• Hired as an engineering manager but primarily operated as a hands-on technical leader, driving process and architectural improvements to bring structure and depth to planning and strategic efforts.

Sep 2019 – Feb 2021 · 1 yr 5 mos · Toronto, Canada Area

• Led a team of up to 10 product developers and SREs, shaping one of my first SRE teams and refining reliability strategies tailored for K-12 students. Managed team growth, technical mentorship, and performance reviews while driving improvements in incident management, CI/CD, and automated testing.
• Worked across technical design, architecture, and reliability engineering, learning firsthand how reliability expectations shift in education; ensuring failure states, messaging, and performance optimizations were student-friendly and appropriate for all grade levels, a true lesson in inclusive reliability engineering.

Nov 2016 – Aug 2019 · 2 yrs 9 mos · Toronto, Canada Area · Hybrid

• Built a sustainable consultancy that generated $1.2M CAD in revenue in 2018, specializing in machine learning, data ops, and distributed systems. Grew a high-caliber team of three and led pre-sales, design, and delivery for clients across industries, while developing expertise in value mapping (Wardley Mapping), technical strategy, and negotiation.
• Led client engagements end-to-end, from technical architecture to deal structuring, bridging engineering and business needs. Delivered enterprise training for IBM on event sourcing, built solutions in Scala, Akka, Kafka, and Cassandra, and personally managed sales, marketing, legal, and accounting functions to scale the business.

Jul 2014 – Oct 2016 · 2 yrs 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Pivoted from Scala developer to representing the language globally, interviewing with Scala’s creator, Martin Odersky, before joining Lightbend as an advocate and technical leader. Traveled worldwide to present at conferences, train enterprise teams, and advise companies on best practices in Scala, Play, Akka, and distributed computing.
• Served as a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies, conducting systems analysis, pre-sales engineering, and technical training to help teams adopt reactive architecture at scale. Delivered expert-led training in Scala (Fast Track to Scala) and Play (Fast Track to Play with Scala) while contributing to industry publications and thought leadership on applied reactive architecture.

Nov 2011 – Jan 2014 · 2 yrs 2 mos · Toronto, Canada

• Introduced Scala, Play, and Akka to the org, leading technical evaluation and adoption before implementing it at scale on Walmart Canada’s e-commerce platform. Led the ground-up rebuild of Walmart.ca, improving site performance, increasing conversions by 20%, and boosting mobile orders by 90% due to significantly faster load times, all while scaling traffic from 2M to 5M page views per minute within a year.
• Served as the Git subject matter expert, leading the SVN-to-Git migration across the Toronto office. Provided coaching and training to engineering teams, ensuring a smooth transition and improved development workflows.

Aug 2010 – Feb 2011 · 6 mos · Toronto, Canada

• Performed legacy system analysis for TD Wealth Management, assessing COBOL-based platforms and mapping functionality for a planned transition to service-oriented architecture (SOA) on Java. Provided technical recommendations before the initiative was ultimately de-scoped.

Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 · 2 yrs · Toronto, Canada

• Led the design, development, and quality control of enhancements to BMO’s public-facing Capital Markets website (bmocm.com), developing solutions in Java. Served as a technical specialist and informal team lead, ensuring high-performance, scalable implementations in a fast-paced environment.
• Participated in an emerging architecture and technology SIG, where I introduced Scala as a solution for managing multicore complexity on the JVM, an early exposure to functional programming that later shaped my approach to distributed systems.

Jan 2000 – Jan 2008 · 8 yrs · Toronto, Canada

• Grew from a mainframe COBOL developer into a senior Java engineer and technical lead, contributing to large-scale enterprise projects in CIBC Wealth Management. Played a key role in modernizing legacy applications, leading efforts to migrate the Horizon portal to a Spring, Hibernate, JSF, and Web Services-based framework.
• Self-taught object-oriented programming while working full-time, earning a Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) certification and transitioning into enterprise software development, a pivotal career shift that set the foundation for everything that followed in my career.