CV
Boston, MA · Contact · LinkedIn
I lead distributed engineering teams at VitalSource and I still design and ship production systems. Recently that has meant a catalog-automation pipeline in Ruby on Rails that turned a manual content-onboarding process into an automated, observable one, and Workbench, an org-wide AI engineering platform adopted across every engineering team. Alongside the day job I run Fruitless Research, a one-person audio software company whose mixing and mastering plugins I design, measure and sell myself. I am drawn to the same thing in all of it: systems that give a whole organization leverage, and staying close enough to the code to build them myself.
Experience
- Lead three distributed engineering teams across five continents delivering Verba Connect, the system that turns a school’s course adoptions and enrollment roster into student-level digital access: auto-enrollment, entitlements, opt-outs, and the billing and reporting data behind the program. 2025 scale: roughly 900 institutions, 5.6 million students, 3,000 term catalogs, 325,000 course materials.
- Own the architecture and technical direction of a mature, high-integration Rails/React platform on GCP and Kubernetes: a deep domain model and a wide integration mesh of versioned REST APIs, asynchronous messaging and partner data feeds.
- Designed and built, hands-on, a production catalog-automation pipeline (Ruby on Rails) that replaced a manual onboarding process: ingesting adoption data, matching it to the catalog, and resolving publishers, pricing, distribution rights and fulfillment.
- Conceived and built Workbench, an org-wide AI engineering platform (Claude Code based) adopted across all twelve engineering teams plus product and QA, embedding agentic AI through the full lifecycle from ticket authoring and solution design to PR review, release validation and post-mortems.
- A one-person audio software company, alongside the day job: a line of mixing and mastering plugins (AU, VST3, AAX; macOS and Windows) whose every readout is measured from the audio, so the user can check the numbers.
- Everything from DSP to storefront: C++ and JUCE with a shared measurement and regression suite; an Astro site and Cloudflare Workers for commerce, licensing and support; Paddle as merchant of record. Licenses are signed offline, with no account, server or telemetry in the plugin.
- Launched August 2026; the free plugin and the mailing to existing owners are the funnel, and the whole line is priced on the mastering record rather than on the plugin market’s defaults.
Senior Manager, Application Development, VitalSource
Apr 2021 – Oct 2023- Owned engineering for Bookshelf Online, a GCP/Kubernetes learning platform serving two billion web requests a month at a 99.99% SLA across all customer-facing services; the largest team in the organization, around thirty people including managers.
Manager, Application Development, VitalSource
Dec 2017 – Apr 2021- Led the team behind VitalSource’s Java-based ePub authoring platform through a significant modernization: retiring tech debt, migrating from AWS to GCP, and moving the team to a containerized development workflow.
Manager, Sales Engineering, VitalSource
May 2016 – Dec 2017 · Greater Boston- Built and led the sales-engineering team, bringing solution-selling discipline and technical credibility to pre-sales.
Executive Sales Engineer, VitalSource
Feb 2011 – May 2016 · Greater BostonManager, Application Development, VitalSource
May 2010 – Feb 2011Application Developer, McGraw Hill
Mar 2005 – Dec 2006 · Bothell, WA- Courseware platforms and content for higher education and K-12.
Recording, mastering, touring, Music, full time
2001 – 2005 · Seattle, WA- Pedro the Lion, Headphones, solo records, and the start of the mastering practice.
Application Developer, Art Technology Group (ATG)
Jun 1998 – Sep 2001 · Boston, MASkills
- Leadership. Distributed teams, Manager of managers, Hiring and growth, Architecture ownership, Delivery across time zones
- Building. Ruby on Rails, Python, React, GCP, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare Workers, Agentic AI tooling, C++ / JUCE audio DSP
- Audio. Mastering (digital and vinyl), Mixing, Production, Loudness and true-peak measurement
Education
- Northeastern University. BS, Computer Science, 1998. Three years of the Mechanical Engineering curriculum before the switch.
Elsewhere
The other half of the record is on the mastering and music pages, and the audio software company is Fruitless Research.