Hands-on CISO and engineering leader with 13+ years in security, distributed systems, and production AI. As CISO at Lavender, an AI-first startup serving 100K+ users, built the security program from zero — SOC 2 Type I to Type II, ISO 27001 kickoff — owned security engineering across GCP, AWS, and Azure, and joined sales on customer security reviews to help close deals, while still writing production code in Go. Co-founded a startup and grew its engineering team from 1 to 15+. Security and compliance leadership across SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001; early adopter of AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Copilot, Codex). Currently a founding engineer at EnergyConnect.
Security & compliance leadership (SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001)Engineering leadership & team buildingFounder / 0→1 product executionDistributed systems & microservices architectureProduction AI & LLM systemsAI-assisted development (Claude Code, Copilot, Codex)Backend engineering (Go, Elixir, Ruby)Cloud architecture (GCP, AWS, Azure)API design (REST, gRPC)Site reliability & system performanceInfrastructure as code & CI/CD
Experience
Founding Engineer
EnergyConnect
April 2026 — Present
Founding engineer on a multi-sided energy and fuel-logistics SaaS platform — owning architecture, backend, and web portals for every party in the transaction from the ground up.
Designing and shipping the platform backend in TypeScript/Node (Express, Prisma/PostgreSQL, Redis/BullMQ) with React portal frontends, deployed on GCP Cloud Run with GitHub Actions CI/CD.
Running an AI-augmented development workflow — Claude Code and OpenAI Codex as daily engineering tools — to ship a multi-portal product surface on startup timelines.
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
Lavender
February 2023 — March 2026
Led security as the company's CISO: built the program from zero, took SOC 2 from Type I to Type II, and kicked off ISO 27001.
Ran security engineering hands-on: IAM, MDM, vulnerability management, incident response, and cloud security across GCP, AWS, and Azure.
Made security a revenue lever by joining the sales team on customer security reviews, helping close deals.
Wrote production code alongside the team: designed and built AI systems and agentic workflows in Go powering core product features for 100K+ users.
Led the GCP-to-Azure migration, saving $350K in infrastructure costs over 6 months, and kept multi-cloud production at 99.99% uptime.
Standardized Claude Code, Copilot, and Codex across engineering, compressing AI feature delivery by an estimated 40–55%.
Mentored engineers and set standards for system design, code review, and observability.
Senior Elixir Engineer
AAMP Global
August 2022 — February 2023
Built high-throughput ingestion pipelines processing telemetry from 40K+ telematics devices across large commercial vehicle fleets.
Deployed and operated Kubernetes clusters on GCP supporting distributed backend services.
Developed new platform features in Elixir while maintaining and gradually migrating legacy Ruby services.
Senior Backend Engineer
BlockFi
June 2020 — July 2022
Led migration of authentication infrastructure from AWS Cognito to Auth0 for a fintech platform serving 225K+ users and housing $400M+ in assets — improving reliability and security posture.
Designed and implemented fraud-prevention controls and security workflows protecting customer accounts and platform stability at scale.
Built internal tooling for user management, identity repair workflows, and operational support — reducing manual support burden by 65%.
Designed secure PII storage and handling processes compliant with financial regulatory requirements.
Mentored junior engineers and drove architecture decisions across identity and authentication services.
Senior Backend Engineer
InsideTrack
January 2018 — May 2020
Built internal analytics platform on Kubernetes processing data for 450K active students across 900+ partner universities.
Developed real-time messaging infrastructure supporting coach-to-student communication across a multi-tenant platform.
Led Ruby-to-Elixir service migration, improving throughput and reducing memory footprint across high-traffic services.
Consolidated microservice footprint from 10 to 6 services, reducing infrastructure cost and operational complexity.
Co-Founder / Engineering Lead
PopSocial
August 2015 — August 2019
Co-founded and served as technical lead; designed and built full platform architecture and backend systems from the ground up.
Scaled engineering team from 1 to 15+ engineers; established hiring, onboarding, and development workflows.
Partnered with product and design to translate roadmap requirements into technical deliverables across multiple product launches.
Senior Software Engineer
One Month
August 2015 — January 2018
Led feature development for the onemonth.com online education platform, serving thousands of learners.
Designed and implemented A/B testing infrastructure to drive data-informed product decisions; rebuilt the billing system, improving payment reliability.
Senior Software Engineer
Qualaroo
August 2014 — August 2015
Led the full rebuild of growthhackers.com in Ruby on Rails, improving performance and maintainability.
Managed 12 offshore engineers across multiple countries while driving feature development and code quality.
Built and tuned a content trending algorithm used to rank and surface platform content at scale.
SOC 2 Type II · HIPAA · ISO 27001 · IAM · MDM · Vulnerability management · Cloud security · Incident response · PII handling
Frontend
React · TailwindCSS · TypeScript · HTML · CSS
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