R-00 / Backend engineering / AI-assisted delivery / product / DevOps / production support

Senior Backend and Platform Engineer

Backend, product, and platform engineer with more than a decade across software development, cloud operations, production support, and technical leadership. Ships reliable products end to end and uses AI-assisted software development and coding agents for codebase analysis, implementation, testing, debugging, and documentation while retaining ownership of architecture and production quality.

01 / Experience

Professional experience

Oct 2024 - Present

Independent Product / Platform Engineer

Independent Development · Remote

  • Founded and launched Safety Ally in 2026, taking the complete product from an empty repository to production in two weeks; subsequently expanded it with additional features and refinements while owning product strategy, architecture, UX, engineering, AWS operations, support, and go-to-market.
  • Designed and built Job Agent and Pilot, agentic systems that use tools, persistent context, external research, decision rules, repository inspection, state tracking, outcome verification, and adaptive multi-step workflows to create career and software-development artifacts.
  • Modeled four subscription tiers against Stripe and SMS costs, then implemented hosted Checkout and Billing Portal, plan changes, signed idempotent webhooks, SMS reload purchases, entitlements, and operator reconciliation.
  • Designed trust-sensitive onboarding around privacy and delivery limits, user verification, ally consent, and Telnyx delivery-state plus STOP, START, HELP, and SAFE workflows.
  • Ran organic and paid launch experiments and built privacy-first UTM attribution from campaign traffic through registration, setup, and paid conversion, with Grafana reporting for visitors, CTR, CPC, and eCPM.
  • Built a durable check-in engine with timezone-aware recurrence, transactional notification queues, database leases, retries, staged escalation, acknowledgement, and resolution workflows.
  • Deployed and operate the ARM64 AWS production stack with health-gated releases, validated deployment automation, rollback procedures, and end-to-end logging, metrics, tracing, and dashboards.
  • Build client tools, database tuning, and API integrations in Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript, and TypeScript.
  • Built Playwright end-to-end tests for Safety Ally's critical user workflows, complementing backend and integration coverage with browser-level release validation.
Dec 2022 - Sep 2024

Lead Backend Developer / Technical Team Lead

GoX Labs · Remote

  • Migrated legacy services to AWS ECS and reduced infrastructure costs during a lean operating period.
  • Set up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
  • Upgraded Rails 5 to Rails 7 with zero downtime.
  • Improved SQL query performance by 25 percent through query and ORM optimization.
  • Expanded RSpec coverage with BDD/TDD practices and mentored engineers on Ruby and architecture.
  • Instrumented services with logging and monitoring and debugged production issues across the Ruby/Rails stack.
Aug 2019 - Nov 2022

Career Pause

Personal Leave · Portland, Oregon

  • Took time away from formal employment, with plans to return disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Resumed full-time engineering work in December 2022.
Jan 2017 - Aug 2019

Custom Solutions Manager

Comcast Technology Solutions · Remote

  • Built and open-sourced the MPX SDK (cts-mpx) and CI tooling in Ruby.
  • Replaced manual Flash-console deployment work with automated ACI-driven transformations, reducing deployments from six hours to one minute and saving approximately $300,000 per year.
  • Designed 654 RSpec examples across cts-mpx and cts-mpx-aci using shared contexts and examples, custom matchers, dependency isolation, API mocking, and failure-path tests, reaching 98.65% and 96.79% coverage.
  • Built and open-sourced MPX ACI (cts-mpx-aci), a graph-aware transformation engine for migrating media configurations and dependencies between development and production environments.
  • Eliminated daily help-desk work by fixing recurring system problems and simplifying operational workflows, removing the need for dedicated daily support coverage.
  • Promoted from entry-level Application Support Engineer through senior and lead roles to Custom Solutions Manager.
Sep 2015 - Jan 2017

Technical Support Lead

Comcast Technology Solutions · Remote

  • Led the support team for high-traffic media services and owned incident response end to end.
  • Built Splunk dashboards tracking latency, error rates, and throughput and configured alerts to surface problems before customers reported them.
  • Improved mean time to recovery through operational tooling, runbooks, documentation, and training.
  • Coordinated escalations between support and engineering teams.
  • Led team troubleshooting of backend issues on high-traffic services.
Jun 2014 - Sep 2015

Senior Support Engineer

thePlatform for Media · Seattle, Washington

  • Investigated media ingest, transcode, and publishing failures.
  • Deployed production services with Capistrano and later with Rundeck and TeamCity as the delivery platform evolved.
  • Performed root-cause analysis through log correlation and communicated directly with customers during outages.
  • Handled escalations and on-call response for production media workflows.
May 2013 - Jun 2014

Application Support IV

thePlatform for Media · Seattle, Washington

  • Served as the final technical escalation before management for complex production issues, coordinating directly with managers and senior operational leaders during outages.
  • Traced requests across microservices with Splunk and debugged API failures, timeouts, and data inconsistencies.
  • Maintained production host health, participated in a 24/7 on-call rotation, and mentored newer engineers.
May 2011 - May 2013

Application Support Engineer

thePlatform for Media · Seattle, Washington

  • Triaged and resolved production issues in a high-volume, ticket-driven environment.
  • Performed NOC duties for the deployment, health, and maintenance of roughly 2,700 production hosts across two data centers of approximately 1,500 and 1,200 hosts.
  • Diagnosed production issues by scraping and correlating logs directly on hosts before centralized Splunk logging was available.
  • Built deep system knowledge through break-fix work and high-volume incident handling.

02 / Capabilities

Technical capabilities

AI-Assisted Engineering

AI-assisted development with production-grade verification

  • Generative AI / coding agents
  • Prompt / context engineering
  • Task decomposition / agent orchestration
  • Repo-local work plans / durable agent context
  • AI-assisted testing / debugging / code review
  • MCP servers / tool integration
  • Human-in-the-loop validation

Build

Services, APIs, and tooling

  • Ruby
  • Go
  • Python
  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • React / Vite
  • Ruby on Rails
  • REST APIs
  • Microservices
  • Keycloak / OIDC
  • RSpec / Playwright / BDD / TDD

Product & SaaS

Payments, product economics, and acquisition

  • Stripe Billing / subscription lifecycle
  • Pricing / unit economics
  • First-party acquisition attribution
  • Product strategy / launch experiments
  • Consent-oriented onboarding

Data

Storage and performance

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • SQL query tuning
  • ORM optimization

Ship

Cloud and delivery

  • AWS ECS / EC2 / ECR / RDS / S3 / Lambda
  • CloudWatch / IAM
  • Docker
  • GitHub Actions / CircleCI / Travis CI
  • TeamCity / Jenkins
  • Capistrano / Rundeck
  • Git workflows / code review

Observe

Signals and diagnosis

  • Splunk
  • Grafana
  • CloudWatch
  • APM / distributed request tracing
  • Prometheus / OpenTelemetry / Tempo
  • Dashboards / alerting

Operate

Production systems

  • Linux administration
  • Bash / shell scripting
  • TCP/IP / DNS / HTTP(S) / VPN / SSL
  • Incident response / on-call
  • Root-cause analysis
  • High-availability architecture / disaster recovery
  • Runbooks / operational documentation

Lead

Teams and durable practice

  • Technical team leadership
  • Architecture and code review
  • Mentoring and training
  • Cross-functional incident coordination

Collaboration

Cross-team and remote delivery

  • Cross-functional / remote collaboration
  • Jira / Confluence / Slack / Microsoft 365

03 / Selected projects

Tools and systems

Job Agent and Pilot

Agentic systems for career and software-development workflows, designed and built with tool use, persistent context, external research, decision rules, repository inspection, state tracking, verification, and adaptation across multiple steps.

Independent Product Portfolio

Safety Ally, Lantern, RepoPlay, and DirFlow: independently shipped products spanning safety check-ins, network intelligence, Git history, and filesystem visualization, delivered with AI-assisted workflows and hands-on ownership of verification and operations.

Comcast MPX SDK and ACI

Open-source Ruby SDK (cts-mpx) and graph-aware transformation engine (cts-mpx-aci) that automated media configuration migration between development and production.

04 / Foundation

Education & recognition

Education / 2007 - 2009

Lake Washington Technical College

Associate in Computer Networking Security and Forensics

Award / Feb 2018

Comcast Starr Award

Awarded for an automated deployment system that reduced labor costs by approximately $300,000 per year.

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