Principal Consultant · Denver, CO
The tangled legacy build, the migration nobody wants to own, the platform decision that needs twenty years of experience behind it — that's where I come in.
My core focus is developer productivity and internal platforms, but I also tackle broader senior engineering work. If a project is ambiguous, highly technical, and requires experienced judgment, let's talk.
Find where engineering time leaks out through slow builds, brittle environments, and manual toil, then fix it.
Move teams off legacy build tooling (Ant, Maven, aging Gradle setups) without stalling delivery mid-migration.
Design and ship the internal tools, devcontainers, and platform surfaces engineers actually want to use, not the ones they’re forced to.
While these are my main focus areas, I'm also open to broader senior engineering work — like architecture reviews, technical due diligence, or complex systems problems that don't fit a clean category. If you have a unique challenge in mind, I'd love to chat.
Standing up a working development environment for a multi-million-line Java monolith took a new engineer two days.
Designed and built the team’s remote development environment from scratch.
New engineers were productive same-day. It became the company-wide standard, used by hundreds of engineers.
A database vendor needed to reach market as a managed AWS service, with no cloud delivery organization in place.
Led development of the cloud services platform both products would run on, on a team of four.
Two products shipped as a service in six months.
Getting the monolith into an IDE meant generating a partial project through custom plugins — a 20-to-60-minute ritual on top of a command-line build unstable enough that re-running a failed command was the accepted fix.
Built IDE integrations for the in-house build system, then for Bazel after the migration, covering both VS Code and Eclipse.
The build ran directly inside the editor for hundreds of engineers. The Bazel integrations are still maintained today.
Forty modules on a stable Ant build carrying roughly ten times the build time it needed, tangled with circular dependencies and understood by only the one engineer who wrote it.
Converted all forty modules to Maven, untangled the dependency graph, and established a standard release process.
Build ownership moved from one engineer to the whole team, on a dependency graph they could finally reason about.
Twenty microservices had no reliable API documentation. Engineers read raw protobuf definitions or generated docs by hand from whatever they had checked out locally — and hit it daily when wiring up new calls between services.
Built a generator producing docs from each service’s OpenAPI and protobuf definitions, discovering new services automatically so they were covered without anyone opting in.
Docs became a build output rather than a maintenance task, and stayed current as the fleet grew.
I've spent over twenty years building enterprise-grade software, and the tooling and infrastructure underneath it. That second layer decides whether engineers spend their day building or fighting their setup.
Most recently, Salesforce. Before it, two stints at MarkLogic ending as Director of Cloud Services, and earlier work at BloomReach, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Boeing.
I'm based just outside Denver and work with teams wherever they are.