About Me

I did everything I could to avoid becoming a software engineer, but it suited me just a little too well. I’m currently the Senior Staff Engineer for the Platform Division at Rover.com. At the top of my company’s IC ladder, I wear a lot of hats. On any given day you might find me doing distributed systems architecture, writing backend code, working on big-picture technical strategy, leading major infrastructure projects, diving into really hard bugs, or helping our teams build software faster and better with agentic AI.

At Rover, I’m fortunate to get to work with some of my favorite languages and open source technologies, including Python, Django, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes. My deepest areas of expertise include:

AI Engineering. I’m Rover’s technical leader on all things AI and LLMs, working with our executive team to shape how we integrate them into our product and our development workflows. I led the rollout of Claude Code across our engineering org, growing adoption from zero to over 80% of our engineers. I’ve also built custom tooling for AI-native development, including an agent orchestration framework and MCP servers. On my own time, I’ve been going deeper, because I like to learn the stack one or two levels below where I usually operate. I rebuilt the Qwen3 LLM architecture from scratch in PyTorch to really understand how transformers work from the inside, getting into the details of the attention mechanism, KV-caching, and speculative decoding. I also wrote my own small CLI coding agent to learn how tool use and subagent orchestration fit together.
Distributed Systems Architecture. I’m the kind of engineer who jumps at the chance to explain eventual consistency, the CAP Theorem, at-least-once delivery, distributed consensus, and more. I’ve owned production systems handling thousands of queries per second and hundreds of thousands of active users. When I led a project to redesign my company’s HTTP request cycle architecture, we ended up cutting infrastructure costs in half.
Performance Engineering. I love spending time in CPU profilers and looking at database query plans. I led an initiative that reduced p50 and p95 response times by 50% across the entire site by identifying and fixing our biggest performance bottlenecks.
Databases. I once taught a 12-week class on database internals and the Django ORM, during which I got pretty good at drawing B-trees on the whiteboard. Postgres remains my favorite database.
Observability and Incident Management. One of my favorite hats to wear is my Site Reliability Engineer hat. I’ll happily talk your ear off about the virtues of distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry, and structured wide event data. I like looking at how complex systems fail and thinking about what we can do to make them more resilient. I believe a good blameless incident postmortem is one of the most useful meetings an engineering team can have.

I view building software as a social process as much as a technical one, and I strive to bring out the best in my teammates, acting as a facilitator and communicator as well as a technical leader. I’m happiest when I can be the catalyst on big projects, creating conditions for engineers to do their best work. I often say that every staff engineer should be able to think like a manager, and I always keep the big-picture business impact in mind, even when I’m solving problems deep in the code.

As a former professor, I’m passionate about mentorship and teaching. Guiding other engineers as they learn and grow helps me see familiar concepts from new perspectives, and it’s made me a better engineering leader and a better communicator.

I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, and studied physics and mathematics at the University of Cambridge. After a stint as an engineer at a tech startup, I earned a PhD in the History of Science from Princeton University, then taught history at a liberal arts college before returning to the tech world. Outside work, I enjoy travel, baking, Texas Hold’em poker, reading (history, sci-fi, spy novels, poetry, Russian literature…), and single malt Scotch.