Apr 2025 – Nov 2025 · 7 mos · Remote

• Leading a team of experts in fault tolerant, highly concurrent applications and infrastructure.

Oct 2024 – Present · 1 yr 7 mos

Mar 2024 – Present · 2 yrs 2 mos

Dec 2023 – Mar 2024 · 3 mos

• It was my pleasure to help Prowler raise money and start a company to support the continued development of this popular open source cloud security tool.

Sep 2023 – Dec 2023 · 3 mos

Nov 2020 – Mar 2025 · 4 yrs 4 mos

• Member of the Board through the term including Trifork's IPO, now publicly traded on Nasdaq Copenhagen.

Jan 2019 – Aug 2023 · 4 yrs 7 mos

• We built a business from initial concept to landing seven-figure, multi-year deals with two of the top telecom companies in the U.S, banks, enterprise healthcare, and many other large enterprises. Our tools bring unprecedented depth of operational insight to infrastructure operators, primarily surrounding Kubernetes, Kafka, and cloud security. We pioneered the Continuous Verification space, and changed the course of operations at scale with our publication the VOID Report. Couldn't be more proud of this team.

Feb 2018 – Oct 2018 · 8 mos

• Built a team to support and extend an edge traffic management platform.

Dec 2017 – Oct 2019 · 1 yr 10 mos

• Advised through Series-A to successful exit.

Oct 2016 – Feb 2023 · 6 yrs 4 mos

• Advising on business development, GTM strategies, and Erlang/Elixir adoption.

Aug 2015 – Jul 2020 · 4 yrs 11 mos

• Advising on Big Data, Availability, and Fault Tolerance strategies.

Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 · 3 yrs

• I manage two teams at Netflix: the Traffic Team and the Chaos Team.
• Traffic Team mission: Fortify availability in anticipation of failures. The Netflix control plane alone is over 3% of bytes on the Internet in North America, deployed entirely on AWS in three regions. When one of those regions has an issue, the Traffic Team engineered the capability to move all customers out of the unhealthy region to the other two, giving us time to identify and fix the underlying issue before moving those customers back. Under my management, we got the time that it takes to conduct a failover from over an hour down to just six minutes. We achieved this with no additional impact to capacity costs, and increased the frequency of testing the orchestration from once every few months to several times a month.
• Chaos Team mission: Facilitate experiments to uncover systemic weaknesses. Even with provably correct behavior of the parts, a complex system can exhibit systemic behavior that is undesirable. Netflix's microservice architecture is a complex system. Chaos surfaces risks to availability before they impact customers, so that we can proactively improve our availability. Under my management, we defined Chaos Engineering (principlesofchaos.org), built a major tool called ChAP (Chaos Automation Platform), conducted three world-renowned Chaos Community Day conferences, and wrote the O'Reilly published book on Chaos Engineering.
• Taken together, Traffic and Chaos help maintain a healthy and agile system, capable of responding to what would otherwise be devastating outages in stride while preserving the quality of service for our customers.

Jun 2014 – Jan 2015 · 7 mos · Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area

• Implemented development processes and reformed client relationship to migrate two in-house engineering teams from missing targets to hit all targets, stabilize the teams, and dramatically improve client satisfaction. In addition to managing development teams, I play a leading role in product and business development, guiding the company through a major pivot into a new product space, High Velocity Big Data. Firsthand experience with a startup navigating the investment cycle and product development.

Dec 2011 – Jun 2014 · 2 yrs 6 mos

• Responsible for operations and P&L for the department. Managed a team of highly skilled consulting engineers and provided architectural guidance to deliver design, development, and training for massive distributed database systems. Typically engaged in activities such as reporting to the CEO, lobbying for client-centric product direction, or on the road meeting with clients in a business development capacity.
• Over half of the Fortune 50 used Basho products, and my team was responsible for interfacing with those clients and delivering multifaceted solutions, usually built on top of the Riak database platform. Team results include delivering groundbreaking application and devops capabilities, significantly increasing license purchases, and hitting revenue targets. My team tackled and solved the hardest problems in the field of distributed storage.

Jan 2004 – Jan 2011 · 7 yrs

• Ran a small consultancy for high-profile, high-traffic online applications. Acted as tech lead for several development teams on dozens of projects. Managed and worked alongside teams onsite, remote, and offshore.
• Wrote and deployed online applications for insurance companies, television stations, news agencies, social networking sites, dating sites, advertising agencies, startups, and organizations in the automotive industry, pharmaceutical industry, and academia.
• Wrote a business simulation, SMRTS, for training sales managers in large pharmaceutical companies. SMRTS is still deployed during training seminars and used in undergraduate, graduate, and executive MBA programs at universities. SMRTS used a novel artificial intelligence algorithm to generate realistic virtual human behavior.
• Example Port Forty Nine client: retained by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope on a multi-year contract to train a team of Ruby developers and engineer a system for storing and disseminating the image archives of space telescopes such as Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, etc. for education and public outreach purposes. This involved working on-site in Pasadena to coordinate with local resources at NASA, Caltech, and JPL to develop a Rails application that ingests images, places them onto a queue built on top of Redis, embeds the images with astronomical data, and then distributes them to a PostgreSQL server and a Java-based Xquery server.

Jan 2001 – Jan 2004 · 3 yrs · Columbus, Ohio Metropolitan Area

• Ran a small consultancy Wrote and deployed a PHP CMS [called cMod, cMod Lite] for medium-sized business and government agencies. Sold the company in 2004 to a website development firm in Ohio.