I'm the operator pre-Series-A AI founders call when their first enterprise security review is blocking a six-figure deal — or when their three-person engineering team has hit the wall and they need to decide between hiring a fourth IC, a fractional staff engineer, or both.
How I work
Most engagements start the same way: a 30-minute call where the founder describes the actual blocker, not the job description. From there I scope a fixed deliverable — SOC 2 readiness in 90 days, a four-month embedded engineering rotation, the next three engineering hires — and ship it without leaving operational debt. I bring real numbers to every decision: $25–45K is what SOC 2 actually costs; $2–4K/month is what a fractional CISO actually costs; the staff hire who's senior-leveled is the one to walk away from. Founders bring judgment to "should we do this." I bring it to "here's how it actually goes."
Background
Most recently Director of Information Security and Staff Software Engineer at Lavender, where I shipped production AI features in Go for 100,000+ users, ran a multi-cloud migration that cut $350K in infrastructure spend, and built the security program through SOC 2 Type II.
Before Lavender: backend engineering and identity at BlockFi, analytics and messaging infrastructure at InsideTrack, telemetry ingestion at AAMP Global, and co-founder of PopSocial where I scaled engineering from a solo build to a fifteen-person organization. Thirteen-plus years of production work, distributed across pre-Series-A, growth-stage, and post-acquisition contexts.
What I believe
The interesting decisions at startup scale aren't about people — they're about commitments. What slice ships first. What hire comes second. What rituals survive the team doubling. The job of a senior operator is to make those commitments cleanly, not to defer them through process or hide them behind frameworks. AI changes the work — it doesn't change that.
If you're working on something ambitious and want an operator on your side, reach out. I take a small number of engagements at a time, and the intro call is the right place to figure out whether one of them is yours.