About

I'm a builder and operator at heart. For more than fourteen years I've built and scaled data, analytics, platform, engineering, and data science capabilities — most of that time in gaming, from $1B+ mobile franchises to a 0→1 startup. Games have been the constant thread — the industry I've built my career in, and something I've loved since long before it was my job. What ties the work together isn't a particular technology; it's a drive to understand a system well enough to operate it, improve it, and rebuild it, rather than just consume a pre-built product. Done well, that drive compounds — into leverage, into faster decisions, into teams that punch well above their headcount.

My path into the work wasn't the standard one — I came up through the sciences, studying biology, chemistry, and environmental science at Oberlin before finding my way into software. That training shaped how I think more than the subject matter ever did. A science background is really a discipline for gaining knowledge under uncertainty: form a hypothesis, test it against reality, update, repeat. It trains you to expect emergent behavior — complex systems doing things none of their parts would predict — and to break messy, unfamiliar problems into pieces you can actually observe, measure, and reason about. I still approach a data platform, an organization, or a problem I've never seen before the same way.

For most of the last decade I led data engineering organizations at Big Fish Games, where I rebuilt a stalled transformation into a cloud-native platform, grew the scope of what we supported while keeping teams deliberately lean, and learned that the highest-leverage move a technical leader can make is usually structural, not tactical — designing the system so good outcomes happen by default.

Today, at Plan A Games, I work across the technical and business sides of an early-stage startup reimagining how user-acquisition funding works in mobile gaming. A lot of my energy goes to AI-assisted workflows — not as an end in themselves, but as the latest, sharpest tool for an old goal: helping a small, capable team produce far more than its size would suggest. As that kind of leverage grows, a lot of long-held assumptions about hiring, architecture, and org design are worth revisiting.

That drive doesn't switch off when I close the laptop. I spend a fair amount of my own time climbing the same ladder — operator, maintainer, hacker, builder — through practical, hands-on skills outside of tech: understanding how the systems around me actually work, and learning to fix and build them myself. I find the same payoff there that I do at work. Broad, practiced capability is its own kind of leverage, and there's a real satisfaction in being someone who builds and operates rather than just consumes.