Hood Canal with the Olympic Mountains in the background. Lofall, WA
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I've spent 25 years leading engineering teams and building platforms, usually at the point where a company has outgrown its infrastructure and needs to migrate, rebuild, or harden it under existing production load. My focus now is agentic engineering: applying modern techniques and controls to automate workflows that were previously difficult to automate and extending the capacity of engineering teams.
Backchain · Building modern automation systems for growth-stage companies and providing fractional engineering leadership on retainer
RBCx / Houseful · Led platform through a ~$200M acquisition; built the platform engineering org and led extensive platform (AWS, EKS) security and regulatory compliance work
OJO Labs · Orchestrated a major platform overhaul, designed the containerized platform supporting hypergrowth, 99.99%+ reliability and 60% lower hosting cost, integrated three engineering teams through acquisitions
Amazon · Built orchestration platforms managing 150+ Kubernetes clusters across three continents, and authored AWS service operators and controllers. Pre-launch EKS contributor
uStudio · Built 24/7 on-call, centralized logging, and Python/React video-platform tooling
Bazaarvoice · Re-architected the platform from datacenter to cloud, serving 50K req/sec at 30B monthly page-views
Rackspace · Global network ops across 10 data centers, 1M+ metrics/sec
Through Backchain, I help growth-stage companies find where AI and automation pay off and help them build it safely.
Current Projects:
- Daedalus — End-to-end autonomous coding pipeline. It works issues from claim to commit with no human turn: an orchestrator plans the change, an implementer writes it test-first, a separate cold review-gate agent judges the diff, quality gates run, and it commits with logged auditability.
- backchain-plugins — Claude Code plugin marketplace.
- advisors — Team of Rivals panel (Visionary, Skeptic, Operator, Ethicist) that argues from focused perspectives and disagrees on purpose. An orchestrator synthesizes their outputs into agreement, disagreement, and a risk-adjusted recommendation.
- engram — Filesystem-backed agent memory. Three skills that capture working memory for cross-session context persistence.
- diogenes — Senior-reviewer audit for AI-slop in writing. Runs in a clean forked context and returns a verdict, an attributable findings table tied to specific passages, and a from-scratch human rewrite.
- drover — CLI document classifier that reads a document, generates structured metadata, and proposes a NARA-compliant filename and path. Swappable backends (Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter) with a local-first default.
- retriever — Hybrid semantic + lexical search over policy and operations docs, generation grounded with source citations.