Senior product engineer with 9+ years of experience building production web applications, primarily in Ruby on Rails.
I work best on small teams where I can stay close to the code, help shape the product, and own consequential technical decisions from architecture through release. My experience includes automated purchasing and payments, identity and access systems, public-interest platforms, third-party integrations, and production operations.
- Backend architecture and product engineering with Ruby on Rails
- Reliable background processing and third-party integrations
- Payment, purchasing, identity, and authorization systems
- Practical uses of AI-assisted engineering with careful human review
Founding Engineer (Contract) | December 2025 - August 2026
Designed and built the complete Rails backend for an automated ticket-purchasing platform released to trusted users through TestFlight.
- Architected purchasing across Ticket Evolution and Stripe, including explicit lifecycle states, concurrency controls, idempotency safeguards, signed webhooks, reconciliation, and failure recovery.
- Enforced customer price, quantity, section, and delivery constraints at purchase time.
- Defined API contracts with the frontend engineer and led integration testing, controlled real-money validation, and production hardening.
Founding Engineer and Maintainer, Phoenix Platform | 2017 - 2025
Varying contract and open-source involvement
Built and maintained Phoenix, the contributor platform that powers ToS;DR's community review of online services' terms and privacy practices.
- Built the Phoenix MVP and helped design and lead implementation of its annotation system.
- Integrated a substantially customized Hypothesis instance, including authentication, data migration, and coordinated annotation changes across both applications.
- Helped develop document collection and historical change tracking for thousands of terms-of-service documents across hundreds of services.
- Led contributor validation and communication for a major annotation-system migration.
Full-Stack Engineer (Contract) | June 2018 - January 2022
Built and secured systems supporting confidential collaboration among hundreds of investigative journalists worldwide.
- Took architectural ownership of Xemx, ICIJ's identity gateway, including LDAP-backed onboarding, single sign-on, PGP setup, and investigation-specific authorization.
- Built YubiKey authentication by extending Devise and integrating WebAuthn.
- Developed a substantial Discourse plugin that enforced investigation boundaries, including direct-link access, and backed the restrictions with automated tests.
The relevant repositories are private because of newsroom security requirements.
Full-Stack Engineer (Contract) | January 2022 - February 2023
- Built Rails APIs and React interfaces for software used to calculate, report, and administer performance-based health financing.
- Modernized frontend data management with React Query.
- Built reusable React and Tailwind components for invoicing and reporting applications used by on-the-ground health-program administrators across sub-Saharan Africa.
- Backend: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python, Django, Pyramid, REST API design
- Frontend: JavaScript, React, Vue, Ember, React Query, Tailwind CSS; working knowledge of TypeScript
- Data and infrastructure: PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Docker, AWS, Sidekiq, Ansible
- Testing and security: RSpec, Jest, WebAuthn, SSO, LDAP, PGP, application security
I also wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning short film Flirtologist. Filmmaking is part of my background, but engineering is my professional focus.