Professional Summary

Software Architect in Chicago with extensive experience building internet and database applications of a wide variety. Proven track record building scalable systems with usable interfaces. Specialties include but are not limited to databases, distributed systems, scaling to fit usage, user interfaces, and overall product architecture. Always ready to adapt to new tools and methods for the project at hand.

Technical Skills

• Infrastructure: Linux, AWS, Digital Ocean, CloudFlare, Nginx, Platform Engineering, System Design
• Data Architecture: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Schemas, OLTP, ETL, Distributed Systems
• Languages & Tools: Python, Git, Javascript, Typescript, Shell, and whatever the project needs
• Leadership: Fluid communicator, entreprenuerial spirit, mentoring

Experience

Senior Software Architect at Ventrilo AI — Menlo Park (Remote), June 2025-March 2026

User onboarding, authentication, registration, payments, for Agentic AI Browser Extension:

• Built authentication and payment systems for overall product
• NextJS, Tailwind, Typescript, Browser Extension Isolation (Service-Worker, Offscreen Document, chrome-extension:// pages, etc)
• Some product development and metrics optimization and monitoring

Chief Architect at Zuno, Inc — San Francisco, February 2015-May 2025

Led technical architecture for a celebrations-focused internet company with multiple successful products:

• Scaled BirthdayAlarm to 5 billion emails and 10 million greeting cards across 218 countries
• Designed and implemented core infrastructure supporting multiple product lines
• Set up distributed systems processing hundreds of millions of records each day
• Unsnarled the twistiest protocol snarls

Software Architect at Monkey Inferno — San Francisco, July 2009-February 2015

First software architect for technology incubator, creating foundation for numerous products:

• Designed and implemented core platform libraries used across dozens of products
• Led complete re-architecture of Birthday Alarm platform
• Created REST and real-time APIs, data models, and system utilities supporting multiple applications

Senior Internet Engineer at StumbleUpon, Inc. & eBay, Inc. — San Francisco, April 2007-July 2009

Led scaling efforts to serve billions of "stumbles" while growing user base from 2.5M to 10M:

• Improved platform performance by 4x by tuning everything from database to app server
• Created distributed data model supporting continuous deployments (it used to be hard)
• Rebuilt core social network infrastructure, developed system profilers and email infrastructure

Lead Software Engineer at Kefta, Inc. — San Francisco, May 2005-April 2007

Led development of Self-Service Content Targeting Engine:

• Built and maintained dynamic targeting server using javascript-over-network techniques
• Implemented data collection funnel into Oracle data warehouse
• Created business and statistical reporting system for users and admins

Education

Bachelors Computer Science. Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, 1996-2000.