About
Staff Engineer & Data Architect
I architect data and application layers for systems where failure is expensive and downtime isn't theoretical. Currently at GameChanger, where I lead data architecture for a platform serving millions of families, 8-10M daily sessions, and 30K+ concurrent video streams. I provide technical leadership across all our product teams, shaping how the organization thinks about data from the ground up.
Before that, I spent over a decade doing similar data solutioning and governance work across healthcare, finance, and enterprise supply chain. Different industries, same structural problems: systems that outgrow the assumptions they were built on, organizations that measure the wrong things, architectural decisions that compound silently until something breaks under load. I've recovered from complete SAN failures, led data breach response, built high-availability systems in HIPAA and PCI environments, and optimized workflows by orders of magnitude. The pattern recognition that comes from seeing these problems repeat across domains is the most useful thing I've acquired.
Right now I'm focused on two things. The first is enterprise AI enablement, specifically the data architecture that determines whether AI initiatives actually work at scale or stay stuck in prototype. I'm building RAG systems, working with vector databases, and collaborating on enterprise standards for AI agents. The second is The Specification Age, a series I'm writing about how AI code generation is exposing the structural gaps the industry has been ignoring for decades. The thesis: the hard part was never code. It was specification, comprehension, and judgment. AI just made that obvious, and now the industry is learning a hard lesson.
Experience
Leading data architecture strategy for the youth sports streaming platform. Responsible for the data application layer supporting 8–10M daily mobile sessions, 4M+ daily queries, and 30K+ concurrent video streams.
- Eliminated seasonal outages, transforming multi-hour customer-facing outages to zero impact during 5–10x peak load
- Reduced backend data operations by 70% through architectural optimization
- Architecting enterprise RAG system integrating 15 years of documentation across GitHub, Notion, Slack, and Google Drive
- Technical leadership across a dozen product teams
Database architecture and reliability engineering for enterprise healthcare supply chain platform serving senior living facilities.
- Optimized time-sensitive workflows to execute 95% faster
- Stabilized database alerting, reducing noise while decreasing server load
- Established database troubleshooting training for SRE partners
Rapid-impact engagement to stabilize and optimize database operations for e-learning platform.
- Improved database performance by 20% and achieved five-nines availability
- Reduced ETL processing time by 50%, enabling near-real-time reporting
Enterprise data architecture leadership for healthcare payments platform in HIPAA-regulated environment.
- Led data center migration and disaster recovery from complete SAN failure
- Reduced core workflow execution time by 80%
- Built data marts for actuarial analytics; led CI/CD pipeline for database development
- Directed data breach response analysis using Python
Database development and administration for legal collections firm with PCI/ISO compliance requirements.
- Transformed reporting from hours to seconds via architecture upgrade
- Engineered custom C# ETL for binary-level data conversion