I lead a team of ~30 engineers across five countries on a platform serving ~2M monthly active users and 700+ enterprise customers — and I own keeping it fast and steady as it grows.
The hard problem isn’t a greenfield build. It’s taking a platform that already carries millions of people and a paying customer base and making it faster, steadier, and bigger without taking it down. That’s the result I’m accountable for.
A few representative results from directing engineering at scale. Each is a system or an organization that came out the other side faster, steadier, or stronger.
Led a distributed engineering organization through Agile transformation, cloud optimization, and AI-driven automation — keeping delivery steady and reporting impact at board level.
Turned around a cloud-native AdTech platform under deadline pressure — multi-region availability, SRE/DevOps discipline, CI/CD, and observability built into the team's habits.
Founded a coding bootcamp and led academic programs across two decades — designing curricula, growing enrollment, and mentoring thousands of students and hundreds of new engineers into the field.
My differentiator is an instinct I install across an organization, not a thing I do alone: reverse-engineer the live system. Understand why production behaves the way it does, then change it deliberately — never the demolish-and-rewrite reflex that’s the top fear when hiring a senior engineering leader.
The teams I lead understand a system's production behavior before they touch it. I build that discipline into how the org works — ownership, review, and the expectation that you explain a system before you change it.
I point engineers at what actually moves the business — reliability, latency under load, the growth curve — so effort lands on root causes instead of symptoms.
The result is a platform that scales without drama, run by a team that knows why it behaves the way it does. I'm accountable for that result, and I build the people who sustain it.
Principal, VP, CTO. I hire, level, and mentor across borders and time zones — and I hold the line between shipping fast and shipping safe. The teams I run are why the numbers above hold.
Glaciologist to software leader to author. The arc isn’t trivia; each phase trained a muscle I still use directing engineering teams today.
NASA- and NOAA-funded glaciology, chasing data from Greenland to the Peruvian Andes — building models of systems too big to see all at once.
AI, mobile, games, AR/VR, e-commerce, blockchain — Principal, VP, CTO. If it ships, I've led the team that built and scaled it.
Wrote a book that turns dense historical research into something a general reader finishes in a weekend.
I write and build at the seam between production engineering and the AI labs — the question of what defensible software looks like when everyone has a model.
Why proximity to customer data — not the model — is the moat for software companies competing with the labs.
Read on Medium ↗Product · in developmentAn AI companion for engineering managers — mobile capture, web generation, two-tier privacy architecture. Built from the manager's chair, not guessed at.
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I spent years reconstructing the life of my ancestor Chaim Zeidler — a Galician Jew who survived captivity in the First World War, lived under a series of assumed identities, and finally remade himself in Brooklyn. A family that wouldn’t be erased, pieced back together from the records it left behind.
About the book ↗