I build software engineering teams and coach them to peak performance.

Experience

I’ve spent nearly thirty years learning in individual contributor (IC) and leadership roles across big tech (manager and IC), startups (co-founder and leadership), and government (military and intelligence).

Senior Engineering Manager, Cloudflare

Workers KV

When I took ownership of Workers KV it was chronically understaffed and suffering from repeated high-impact outages. I hired and developed a completely new team then established a culture of operational excellence based on shared understanding. Together we took the service from a laggard to a leader in operational stability initiatives, all while doubling traffic to the service every four months. The team now ships customer-facing features and performance optimisations multiple times each week and has reduced hot read latency by an order of magnitude.

Hyperdrive

Formed and led the engineering team that launched general availability of Cloudflare Hyperdrive - a service that accelerates queries you make to existing databases.

Pub/Sub

Managing ongoing maintenance of Cloudflare Pub/Sub, our distributed MQTT messaging service.

Queues

Led the engineering team that launched the private and public betas of Cloudflare Queues - distributed queues without the egress fees.

Head of Developer Advocacy, Fauna

Led the Developer Advocacy (DA) team, supporting our DAs in designing, creating, and publishing content that helped developers simplify code, reduce costs, and ship faster with Fauna - the distributed document-relational database.

Senior Developer Advocate, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

As the Serverless org’s subject matter expert (SME) for Application Integration and Go, I initiated content programs for Twitch and YouTube with over 26,000 views in six months without paid promotion; contributed content for over 10,000 of those views on a team of seven. Created and ran two-hour workshops to help developers get started with Go, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB on AWS. Delivered talks and workshops at conferences and pivoted to streaming when COVID-19 shut down in-person events.

AWS Step Functions

This eight-episode series dove deep into AWS Step Functions, a powerful service for building distributed applications on AWS using visual workflows. As of November 2024, videos in the series have been viewed over 90,000 times, and the series itself has over 10,000 views.

Accompanying code is available on GitHub.

App 2025

This six-episode series from 2020 explored trends in event-driven architectures (EDAs) on AWS. App 2025 predicted how customers would build serverless applications on AWS in 2025 and showed how developers could adopt those patterns early to gain a competitive advantage. Four years and over 13,000 views later, its predictions have formed the standard approach for building EDAs on AWS.

Accompanying code is available on GitHub.

Infrastructure Engineer

Designed and implemented cloud infrastructure projects for clients in the US, UK, and UAE. Built and improved CI/CD pipelines with CircleCI, Docker, Amazon ECR, and Amazon CodeDeploy. Introduced infrastructure as code with Terraform and trained development teams on its use, reducing time to first delivery, time to deployment, and error rates.

Co-founder, WorkFone

Technical co-founder of WorkFone, virtual mobile devices that deliver multiple professional identites on a single smartphone.

Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency

As a Case Officer at CIA I clandestinely spotted, assessed, developed, recruited, and handled non-U.S. citizens with access to foreign intelligence vital to U.S. foreign policy and national security decision-makers.

Not sure what that means or what value it offers to the private sector? One of my former colleagues said it best:

It’s exponentially harder to be hired by the Agency than it is to get into Harvard, and not only was I hired based on an assessment of strong judgment and the ability to operate in ambiguous situations, I then was trained to do just that, and then did it for years.

I was entrusted to create and carry out some of the most sensitive and most important missions that the U.S. Government conducts, often with little direction. Not only did I have to plan and do them, I had to do so in secret, with lives on the line, which is hard to put a price tag on.

You can give me your toughest problem, and I will figure out how to solve it in record time with buy-in from those whom you rarely get buy-in, and position you for multiple shots on goal for future opportunities because I will have your company and sector wired.

I can do for you what I did for our country: evaluate opportunity, mitigate risk, and make quick and smart decisions that attack problems differently than a typical insider would.

Give me a couple hundred thousand of combined salary and operating budget, and I’ll turn it into millions of dollars in returns or investments within two years - not singlehandedly - but in a cooperative way that leverages many parts of the company. We’ll row in unison and we’ll row in the right direction. And I’ll do it all from a supporting role, with you at the helm and you as the ultimate decision-maker.

— Laura Thomas¹

I didn’t just do the job, I did it exceptionally well - “conspicuously above normal duties.” For that I was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit. For context, that’s the same medal awarded to Gina Haspel, former Director of CIA.

Sergeant, United States Army

Light infantry - one of the best jobs I ever had and probably the most influential on my leadership thinking. Awarded the Army Commendation Medal.