Experience

Senior engineer in a startup studio, frequently acting as the first or sole engineer on new product initiatives.

• Built the initial backend and infrastructure for Pettable.com from scratch; codebase was retained and built upon as the company grew and hired its own team.
• Built the initial lead-capture and self-service system for TopNutritionCoaching.com — a custom Webflow-to-backend pipeline with a Serverless API integrating Calendly, Airtable, and a database; handed off to a dedicated dev team.
• Shipped multiple feasibility prototypes and product tests across the portfolio, including one that validated the concept behind Learner.com.
• Migrated legacy Conjecture infrastructure (including Wisegeek) from bare-metal to AWS (ECS, RDS, Docker, CI/CD).

Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Next.js, AWS (ECS, RDS, Lambda, S3), Serverless, Shopify.

First engineer on Wisegeek, a content platform that grew to ~20M monthly unique users at peak. Turned 150 static HTML pages into a custom CMS in 2003 — before mainstream frameworks or CMS platforms existed — and evolved the system continuously for over a decade.

• Sole engineer for the first four years; began hiring in 2007, built and led a team of up to 8 developers.
• Owned backend architecture, database design, and production operations throughout.
• Designed and operated MySQL infrastructure: replication topology (read replicas, standby/failover master), query optimization for read-heavy workloads.
• Replaced MySQL NDB Cluster with standard replication after a cluster corruption incident; built custom failover scripting for zero-downtime master promotion. Recovered data from corrupted cluster storage via a custom binary parser, saving days of work for 100+ content operators.
• Led platform evolution from PHP 4 through PHP 8 over the system's lifetime.
• Over the years, became the founder's sole technical partner across Conjecture's entire portfolio — owning architecture, hiring, delivery, and team for every product, not only Wisegeek.
• That portfolio spanned web and several mobile apps — a notable one being QuizGeek, a mobile trivia game on iOS & Android (2016–2019).

Built a real estate listing and inventory management platform for a local market from day one.

• Full technical ownership: architecture (PHP/MySQL), implementation, technical hiring, analytics, and paid acquisition.
• Reached ~120 real estate agents (~60–70% of active agents in the city); tens of thousands of active listings.
• Designed master-master MySQL replication between a local office server and a hosted VPS to keep operators working through frequent connectivity outages.
• Led a small team (up to 2 developers); reached breakeven by 2013.
• Discontinued in 2014 following the local real estate market collapse.