Product Breadth, Technical Depth

I'm a product focused engineer and leader. I create software to solve problems for businesses in a manner which creates long term value and emergent opportunities to capitalize on.

Better.com, Engineering Manager

March 2018 - May 2022

  • Managed five product-feature teams creating the technical foundation for whole divisions of the business
  • Collaborated with and managed sophisticated stakeholders in Capital Markets & Financial Markets
  • Led the creation of a patent pending, best in class and industry first pricing & eligibility engine for near real time evaluation of complex loan scenarios
  • Acted as a key thought partner across the broader organization in driving product, business, and technology decision making
  • Helped refine interview process, interviewed hundreds of engineers, trained interviewers, and performed 'sell calls'
  • Designed, managed, and led the live onboarding process for Product, Design, Engineering, Eng Ops, Product Support, and Product Ops teams
  • Created and led lauded organization-wide knowledge sharing sessions attended by C-level

Consulting Engineer

2013 - 2018 (Select Experiences included)

Draft

Following their acquisition by Paddy Power Betfair (Flutter Entertainment), Draft.com began a major marketing spend ahead of the 2017 NFL Season. I was brought on as a consultant to scale the backend ahead of the season. I identified scaling bottlenecks in the app code, architecture, and underlying libraries. I provided remedies and guidance to address each. Additionally I constructed a massively concurrent realtime websocket/http load testing script to prove out scalability and find networking/IO bottlenecks along the way. Draft is now part of FanDuel.

Green Business Partnership

Green Business Partnership evolved out of a Westchester County effort to help businesses adopt sustainable practices. I developed a comprehensive web application to allow them to manage their member subscriptions and sponsorships. Additionally, a React interface guides companies and their employees through a survey to collect the specifics of their practices such as energy usage and waste production to aid in their certification effort.

Medly Pharmacy

Medley Pharmacy delivers prescriptions to your door for free. They have over a dozen brick and mortar locations in NYC and are launching an iOS app. This work was in collaboration with Posse. I worked heavily on the backend and administrative interfaces while interacting with the client to get closer to launch.

Swill

I built an inventory pipeline which accepts, extracts, transforms, and normalizes data from thousands of point-of-sale systems into a single stream of product inventory representing all of Swill's partner stores. This involved a complex information retrieval and extraction hierarchy and we leverage a machine trained model for new product discovery as well as a whole host of tricks and heuristics to get high accuracy real time data as output.

EnhancedMood

I worked directly with a clinician to develop a simple iOS app (ReactNative) to allow users to inventory their current mood. The simple routine of "checking in" to an emotion and receiving a content-based reward is proving to break the cycle of negative thoughts and emotions. The program is now entering an NYU accelerator.

Vive Style

As a contractor I led, for several months, development at Vive.co in the absence of an in-house team and only a small set of remote contractors. I worked with the CEO to organize the development roadmap and coordinated with designers to build an agency-style process within a fast moving start up. We produced comprehensive designs which reflected the true long term business priorities and worked to incrementally implement them across multiple platforms.

Parachute Health

I worked with Parachute Health to create a microservice backend and API to securely and compliantly verify the eligiblity of incoming patient insurance data for an array of medical products. This involved very strict validation, composable rules, and in the case of failure, detailed responses and steps to correct.

BibMe.org

BibMe is an extremely high-traffic citation service for students and researchers. I implemented a redesign to help boost ad-traffic and usability of the site. I also increased the number of sources from which users could cite from 4 to 7000+ and implemented a complementary cross-platform interactive search tool for discovery of such sources.

Short Insider, Cofounder & CTO

June 2012 - Present

Short Insider collects, aggregates, audits, and analyzes short interest disclosures from across the European Union and several other countries. We provide high quality real time and daily feeds to our clients.

Urtak, Product & Engineering

Union Square July 2011 - April 2012 (NYC TechStars 2011)

I was the first product & engineering hire at Urtak. Urtak built a highly innovative collaborative polling technology with extraordinarily high engagement rates with audiences. Placed below an article and kicked-off by a publications' staff the poll quickly gets richer as users contribute yes/no questions to it.

We never quite figured out how to turn it into an ad product but it was quite a journey nonetheless. I mostly worked as an engineer on the core of the product and pursued building out our statistics and visualizations capabilities to better understand and share our data.

drop.io, Systems Engineer

DUMBO February 2010 - November 2010 (acquired by facebook)

  • Worked with business, operations and engineering to develop and direct a product roadmap
  • Created and owned processes surrounding infrastructure provisioning and deployment
  • Developed deployment, branch management, code maintenance, testing, and quality strategies
  • Production operations team member

Digital Pulp, Developer

New York, NY July 2008 - December 2009

  • Developed, launched and maintained high traffic data driven content management systems
  • Built a publishing platform to integrate a major trade magazine with the web
  • Used cutting edge deployment, testing and source control tools
  • Worked with and contributed back to open source projects
  • Learned test / behavior driven development

Montclare Lab, Research Assistant

Brooklyn, New York 2004-2006

  • Researched nanoscale drug delivery vehicles and copolymers for tissue engineering
  • Routinely performed cloning, culturing, expression, purification, and spectroscopy
  • Cloned a library of protein polymers for nanoscale drug encapsulation
  • Performed kinetics and fluorescence studies to measure substrate binding and activity
  • Work presented at the American Chemical Society National Conference

Owner and webmaster of SidGames.com

Warren, New Jersey 1997 - 2001

  • A seemingly very long time ago. How I got my start.
  • Apparently there is still some record of this on the web.
  • Microsoft IIS, (Allaire -> Macromedia -> Adobe) ColdFusion, MSSQL

Projects & Experiments

Salt to Taste

My 'unicorn' project, to-be-rebooted. Salt to taste is a collaborative cookbook where users with different taste preferences and dietary restrictions can edit in-line other peoples recipes, creating a 'fork' a-la-git(hub). Edits can be upvoted and popular changes will automatically become the default ('master') version of a recipe.

Up On The Board

Up On The Board was an experiment when I was first learning React. The idea is to create a public self-cleaning pinboard. Old posts slowly dissapear unless they are still relevant (upvoted). Posts can be tweeted, emailed, SMS'ed, or posted over the web with text or rich media. The pinboard's content flows responsively and will only show the number of posts which can tastefully fit on the viewing device. Each board comes with a Chromecast (now 'Google Cast') integration so that offices can use it as an internal memorandum board on any TV they may have mounted.

Humble Suggestions

February - June 2013

Humble Suggestions was an experiment which arose out of services like pinboard, Instapaper and more recently Pocket which push content onto a queue for you to consume later. Humble Suggestions would resurface content at contextually appropriate times. I discovered the same thing Netflix did, which is that on Friday at 7PM, before going out you may not want to watch an old black and white movie on your Netflix queue, but a rainy Sunday afternoon might just be the perfect time to send you a reminder as a humble suggestion. I shut down the service after Netflix discontinued their API.