Software Engineering Leader · Founder, Dev Forward · Chicago

I build AI systems on guarantees, not vibes. And teams that do the same.

A decade scaling consumer and B2B platforms, now building AI-native products with the rigor most teams skip: typed contracts, deterministic gates, grounded outputs, and humans at the gates that matter.

10+ years leading engineeringScaled an 18-engineer orgFounder, Dev Forward

What I believe, and what it looks like in the work

01 / 04
P1

Build on guarantees, not vibes.

The reliable systems enforce their invariants structurally. A verifier that drops uncited claims. A determinism boundary an LLM can't cross. An on-chain vault math check. Not a prompt you hope will hold.

P2

Keep humans at the gates that matter.

Concentrate approval where reasoning is expensive to get wrong: requirements, architecture, plan, critical findings. Let execution run autonomously inside those bounds.

P3

Ground everything, and cite it.

In regulated domains an answer is only as good as its provenance. Typed snapshots and source references make outputs auditable, and safe to ship.

P4

Great technology is built by great teams.

My job as a leader is the culture that produces the work: clear direction, trust, ownership, continuous learning. I coach engineers into the leaders who build the next thing.

The evidence

Gauntlet AI Fellowship
12+AI-native systems
shipped end-to-end

Most deployed live, on infrastructure I built and operate.

An intensive fellowship treating AI as the core primitive of a system, not a feature bolted onto a CRUD app, built with the same rigor across every domain.

HealthcareFintech / DeFiLegaltechProptechEdtechVoice AIAI SecurityPrivacyDev Tooling
10+
Years leading eng
18
Engineer org built
30%
AWS spend reduced
9
Industries shipped

What I do

Capabilities

Engineering Leadership

Org design, coaching, and building cultures of ownership. Scaling teams through change.

Platform Modernization

Guiding legacy systems toward modern, composable, cloud-native architectures.

AI Engineering

Agentic systems and LLM applications built with grounding, evaluation, and gates.

Reliability & Operations

Observability, incident response, and performance that holds under real traffic.

Developer Experience

Internal platforms, tooling, and automation that make teams faster and more resilient.

Product Partnership

Aligning engineering execution with the product and business outcomes that matter.

Scaling a team, modernizing a platform, or building something new? Let's talk.

Email

Dev Forward work, consulting & detailed projects.

LinkedIn

Introductions, leadership roles & quick questions.

GitHub

See what I'm building.