me

Hi, I'm Joe, I build the systems companies run on, and I grow the engineers who run them. Kindness and curiosity are not soft skills to me. Supported people do hard things.

My Philosophy & Vision

I default to kindness. Even when the path forward is unclear, kindness creates space for creativity. Failure is growth.

I lead with curiosity and clarity. People are doing their best in their context. Leadership is trust, not control.

I want to spend my time on work that matters for people and the planet.

My journey so far…

2023 - Present: New AI/LLM Horizons

  • Project Vigor - built a chat-driven AI coach that transforms personal goals into step-by-step schedules, with a direct iCal integration.
  • Shipped several LLM-powered tools, including a Slackbot that lets infrastructure and dev teams interact with their AWS environment through conversation.
  • Designed and built an end-to-end MLOps platform on Kubernetes from scratch: data collection and versioning, GPU training and benchmarking, and model publishing to inference endpoints for vision and natural language workloads.
  • Built a web-based coloring-book generator and experimented with vector databases and LLM agents.
  • Mentor engineers on reliability, scalability, and rapid experimentation across multiple teams.

2017 - 2023: Scaling and Leadership

  • Took a company’s infrastructure from early startup foundations on a default VPC to a SOC 2 Type II certified production platform serving high-throughput OLTP workloads, supporting growth from 20 to 70+ engineers.
  • Designed self-service platform tooling adopted across 5 product teams shipping multi-tenant SaaS, single-tenant SaaS, and on-prem. A single platform cut deploy times and lifecycle overhead across every delivery model.
  • Created per-pull-request cloud development environments by extending the team’s existing tooling instead of replacing it. Developer-owned from day one, scaled to 200+ concurrent environments.
  • Built the Terraform module library, Atlantis workflows, and infrastructure-as-code practices for the broader AWS footprint, including a global networking mesh for disaster recovery and standby failover.
  • Deployed full observability across Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and OpenTelemetry, and wrote custom Go services for SRE dashboards, SLO tracking, and incident response workflows.
  • Led a lean SRE team managing 5 products with 24x7 on-call, maintaining 99.95% uptime and cutting mean time to recovery by 40%.
  • Built a global email security validation framework spanning 12 AWS regions and 100+ domains, using a neural network to generate content and measure how well email gateways caught it.
  • Embedded with a Fortune 100 client managing tens of thousands of servers across 100-200 AWS accounts. Designed serverless map-reduce pipelines for IoT telemetry.
  • Architected global cloud deployments for multiple clients, both active-active and active-passive failover.
  • Designed and built a network intrusion-detection and hunt tool end to end: sensors in Go and Rust, the backend and analytics layer, and a React component library and full UI from scratch.
  • Built a Modbus ICS simulation modeling a complete town water-treatment system, used to test and train against industrial-control-system threats.
  • Founded a data company, architected a platform processing 350M geospatial records per day with a custom S3-based trie index over ~200TB, queryable on multiple dimensions for under $5K/month with self-healing resharding.
  • Founded a drone company. Designed a modular 3D-printable payload ecosystem for commercial drones with data/power rail spine and clip-in sensor modules. Successful flight tests across multiple airframes.
  • Built and led a growth-focused sales-engineering practice serving finance and energy sectors, shrinking proof-of-value cycles from weeks to days.
  • Guided cross-functional teams through rapid prototyping, turning data insights into customer-facing features at startup speed.

2015 - 2017: Product Development and Delivery

  • Built an OLAP analytics platform (Kafka, Spark, Elasticsearch) serving multiple federal agencies from a single framework with a lean engineering team of under 10.
  • Had the privilege of working with Dr. Brad Cox, creator of Objective-C, building systems to deliver his Spark-based analytics at scale.
  • First infrastructure-at-scale role. Managed hybrid infrastructure between physical server racks and AWS, learning horizontal scaling in a big-data context. Foundation for everything that came after.

2011 - 2015: Big-Data Engineering and Analysis

  • Designed and deployed a visual workflow tool that automated complex multi-source analysis, scaling from zero to 5,000+ users and doubling the platform’s addressable market.
  • Built a natural language report triage system that tokenized intelligence reports, trained labels with volunteer analysts, and automatically sorted incoming reports by priority. Replaced a manual process that was never complete with one that was 80-90% accurate on its worst day.
  • Led big-data solutions using Hadoop/Solr stacks to support global military and intelligence missions.

2006 - 2011: Building Engineering Foundations

  • USAF Cryptologic Linguist stationed at NSA Hawaii. Took raw intelligence feeds across multiple data sources and built conclusions about targets.
  • Designed a multi-source intelligence correlation process that gave geolocation to data that previously had none. A separate team (3-4 people) was formed around this capability.
  • Automated a manual cryptographic process by building a distributed compute system across office workstations that pre-decrypted messages overnight.