About

20+ years across enterprise and growth-stage SaaS, from large complex organizations to companies in active transformation. I improve delivery and operational discipline, connect technology decisions to real business impact, and build engineering cultures that grow leaders from within, leading remote and distributed teams throughout my career. I work across Product, Customer Success, and commercial teams to keep engineering aligned with company strategy and long-term growth. I stay hands-on with emerging AI tooling, building custom Claude skills for workflows like Early Availability call summarization.

I came up from support, through quality engineering, into engineering leadership, so customer impact shapes how I lead. I favor a holistic testing strategy that supports rapid iteration without sacrificing quality: automation built into the pipeline, exploratory testing where it matters, and quality owned by the whole team. I'm open to VP of Engineering roles.

Skills & Proficiencies

Leadership & Org Design

  • Team scaling
  • Manager & leader development
  • Hiring & performance management
  • Matrix leadership
  • Remote & distributed teams
  • Outsourced & offshore partners
  • Engineering culture
  • Communities of practice

Product & Strategy

  • Roadmap ownership
  • Product partnership
  • Go-to-Market alignment
  • Early Availability programs
  • Customer discovery
  • Build vs buy decisions
  • Feature flags
  • SaaS growth

Building AI Agents

  • AI platform architecture
  • Production AI agents
  • LangChain & LangGraph
  • Langfuse observability
  • AI evals
  • Agent cost optimization

Agentic Development

  • Cursor
  • Claude
  • Custom Claude skills & workflows
  • Rapid AI-assisted prototyping
  • Evaluating emerging AI tools
  • Local AI monitoring (Grafana)

Cloud & Platform

  • AWS: IAM, VPC peering, CloudFront, Route 53
  • EKS & Fargate
  • Lambda
  • SQS
  • S3
  • RDS & DynamoDB
  • EC2
  • Multi-account cost visibility
  • GitHub Actions
  • Infrastructure as code (Terraform)

Observability & Data

  • Elastic & Kibana
  • APM & tracing
  • Log analysis & alerting
  • Crashlytics & Pendo
  • PostgreSQL & MySQL
  • Query tuning & indexing tradeoffs

Delivery & Operations

  • CI/CD
  • DORA metrics
  • Cycle time
  • Change failure rate
  • Root cause analysis
  • Escalation & priority matrices
  • SOC 2 & security remediation
  • Tech debt management

Quality Engineering

  • Holistic test strategy
  • Quality at speed
  • Shift-left testing
  • Tests in CI/CD pipelines
  • Test automation frameworks
  • Exploratory testing
  • Performance & load testing
  • Security testing
  • QA org leadership
  • Testing communities of practice

Mobile

  • Native iOS & Android
  • SwiftUI & UIKit
  • Jetpack Compose & Views
  • Offline-first sync
  • Mobile architecture (MVVM)
  • Fastlane & TestFlight
  • App Store Connect & Google Play Console
  • Staged rollouts
  • Firebase Remote Config
  • App store quality

Languages & Frameworks

Reading, reviewing, debugging, and shipping production code.

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Python
  • Swift
  • Kotlin
  • JavaScript
  • Java
  • Go
  • PHP

Experience

ServiceTrade

Mar 2022 – Present

Director of Engineering · Oct 2026 – Present

Sr. Software Engineering Manager · Mar 2022 – Oct 2026

  • Business ImpactOwned engineering across multiple core revenue-generating products while the business more than doubled — CARR grew 108% from $23.9M in 2022 to $49.6M in 2025.
  • Org LeadershipBuilt and scaled teams spanning iOS, Android, AI Platform, and full-stack product, with a culture centered on ownership, quality, and growing leaders from within.
  • Product & Customer PartnershipOwned product strategy and roadmap alongside Product. Co-led Early Availability programs with Product and Go-to-Market to prototype, iterate, and ship quickly.
  • Mobile TransformationLed a quality overhaul of the iOS and Android apps, lifting app store ratings from 2 stars to 4+ and contributing directly to retention and revenue.
  • AI PlatformIdentified the opportunity for an extensible AI Platform as the launchpad for agent-powered features. Shipped three production AI agents with a 73% reduction in agent costs.
  • Smart Tech PrepGuided the launch of an AI job and appointment summarizer with a built-in chatbot, now generally available, that gives technicians the location and job details they need before arriving and lets them ask follow-up questions, cutting calls back to the office. Directed the implementation alongside a senior engineer, introduced Langfuse as the company’s first AI observability layer (which helped cut costs from prototype to production and speed up resolving early issues), and guided guardrail design. Technicians report saving 3–4 hours a week (anecdotal) and rate its usefulness 5–7 out of 7.
  • AI SchedulingPivoted a team into a dedicated AI tiger team building Stella Schedule, an agentic scheduling assistant now in early availability.
  • Agentic DevelopmentDrove adoption of agentic development tools like Cursor and Claude by setting team exploration goals, creating space to experiment, and consulting on usage and outcomes. Partnered with the AI Transformation Lead and ran the company's first "FastFusion" two-day feature delivery events.
  • Delivery & Operational ExcellenceOverhauled CI/CD, test automation, root cause analysis, and tooling, using cycle time and change failure rate to drive decisions and intentional tech debt management.
  • Cloud & InfrastructureLed AWS improvements across EKS, Fargate, Lambda, SQS, RDS, and EC2 with GitHub Actions CI/CD, strengthening reliability and observability.

Cengage

Feb 2019 – Apr 2022

Manager, Software Development Engineering · Mar 2021 – Apr 2022

  • Engineering LeadershipLed two engineering teams on Ed2Go, driving quality and delivery improvements across the broader organization.
  • Culture & CommunityFounded the company-wide Software Testing Guild across a 600+ person org and 9+ products — 17 sessions averaging 20–30 engineers.

Manager, Software Development Engineering in Test · Feb 2019 – Mar 2021

  • Quality & Delivery LeadershipMatrix leadership across four product and platform teams, managing 15 QA engineers and raising standards beyond direct reporting lines.
  • Test Automation FrameworkLed the company-wide Content Test Automation Framework, catching content and platform issues across mission-critical products.

Netsertive

Oct 2014 – Feb 2019

QA Manager · Lead QA Engineer · Sr. QA Engineer

  • Quality & Delivery LeadershipGrew from IC to QA Manager, building quality teams and helping move production deploys from bi-weekly to daily.
  • Automation FoundationBuilt the first UI test automation frameworks and unified sprint testing workflows, cutting cycle times.

Early Career

Farragut Systems

Senior QA Engineer

2012 – 2014

Led cross-functional teams on large government systems, including the NC Vehicle Tax and Property Tax systems.

The Audio Dojo

Founder & Owner

2010 – 2012

Ran a professional recording studio — operations, client relationships, and creative production.

LexisNexis

Senior QA Engineer & Team Lead

2004 – 2010

Led six QA engineers across large-scale testing projects, including offshore coordination and mentorship.

Education

North Carolina State University

2004

B.A. Psychology, Sociology Minor

Graduated with Honors · Gamma Beta Phi Honor Society