An engineering and data leader who's never stopped building. Two things have shaped my career: walking through doors when they opened, and genuinely wanting to understand what was on the other side. I started as an insurance rater who got pulled onto a software team. A decade of engineering followed — full-stack, iOS and Android apps for the NY Times and ESPN, a small app studio on the side. Then a mobile engagement at a data company turned into nine years, three director seats, and a front-row seat inside one of the largest retail data orgs in the country. Now Head of Data at Kin. The doors have been different every time. The curiosity hasn't.
Joined Kin as Head of Data with a 30+ engineer org at an inflection point, and spent the last year working with the team to set a stronger foundation — building out the leadership bench, teaching the team to find problems before customers do, to stay grounded in who signs the checks, and to be reasonable in the short term while staying right for the long term — and bringing recurring data incidents down from multiple per week to single digits per month.
Together we've restructured around a cross-functional pod model, separated the data-engineering and analytics-engineering IC tracks to resolve longstanding role friction, and stood up the team's first Data Governance and Data Reliability Engineering functions. (A personal highlight: recognizing an engineer already inside the company as the right fit for the inaugural DRE seat — she's since earned the senior promotion.)
The most energizing part has been what the team has built with agentic AI: an engineering practice that's quietly running two platform migrations in parallel — Redshift to Databricks and a legacy Airflow upgrade — saving months of developer time and creating room for the team to focus on what's next.
We also cleaned up the platform's fundamentals. A novel ingestion framework the team shipped cut new-source onboarding from weeks to hours. And by recognizing that an expensive orchestration approach had exactly one project in production, we decommissioned it and rebuilt the data foundation on Databricks notebooks — recovering roughly $250K in annualized platform spend through the resulting compute and storage optimization.
Came in as a prototyper. What 84.51° actually needed was a data engineer who understood the app side of things — which happened to be me. That turned into nine years.
The first director seat was Prism Measurement, where I scaled the team from two engineers to thirty, promoted two direct reports into director-level positions, replatformed the analysis stack off SAS onto PySpark on Azure Databricks, and helped drive a 400% revenue increase for Kroger Precision Marketing.
From there I moved laterally into Enterprise Data Services to consolidate a sprawl of overlapping data-movement and quality tools into a coherent self-service platform supporting 1.9M pipeline runs a year — and then again into Enterprise Data Products, running a focused 5-person team that owned 84.51°'s flagship data product, the upstream source for more than 90% of the company's revenue streams, publishing over a billion rows annually under near-zero downtime SLAs.
Returned to Cardinal with sharper tools and put on the firm's highest-profile mobile engagements, leading a team of team leaders. I stood up 84.51°'s "mobile factory" from scratch — security, training plans, CI/CD pipelines, developer environments, and even a Mac mini I had to get physically installed in their data center to make the iOS simulator work behind their security software. It started as a two-week consult and turned into a six-month engagement.
At Fifth Third Bank I led the rebuild of their mobile check-deposit feature in Protocol-Oriented Swift, fixing a host of user-reported bugs along the way and cutting customer-support inquiries 20% through end-to-end UX and code-quality fixes.
Black Pixel was one of the elite boutique mobile development firms — Apple's go-to recommendation when they referred app work out. I came on as one of the firm's first native Android developers when their Android practice was just getting going, and ended up shipping flagship Android work for some of the best brands in the business: NY Times, ESPN, and Starbucks.
The most rewarding piece was leading the Android implementation of the NY Times front-page redesign — coordinating directly with their print team and with Google to meet the exacting rendering and editorial standards their print legacy demanded. I also reverse-engineered Starbucks' Mandarin-commented Android codebase to ship the app in the Chinese market, delivered the ESPN Android revamp on a compressed launch window, and provided Android strategy guidance to the firm's VP of Engineering as he ramped up on the platform.
I joined Cardinal as the firm's first dedicated native mobile developer back when iOS and Android were still emerging in the enterprise. Over the next two years I helped grow the mobile practice from one engineer to ten — hiring, mentoring three new-grad developers through the Vantiv Accept "Square competitor" mobile-payments build, and convincing leadership to bring on dedicated graphic-design capacity because I believed user-centered design wasn't something you could bolt on at the end.
A mobile-banking prototype I built for Fifth Third Bank turned into a $1M+ contract for the firm, and I delivered compliance-grade native apps for clients including Johnson & Johnson along the way.
This is where my career started, and not as a developer. I was hired as an insurance rater — manually calculating commercial premiums for small-business policies — and then pulled onto a software development team building the rules engine to automate that math, because I knew the business and they figured they could teach me to write a little code along the way. Turned out I fell in love with programming.
I spent the rest of my tenure on the eCLAS BOP/DBOP small-business policy issuance system in Java, IBM ILOG JRules, and .NET, supplementing what I learned on the job with open coursework from MIT and Stanford. Toward the end I built one of the company's first native Android mobile prototypes — which is how the next chapter of my career started.
Co-founded and run by my wife and her sister. They help adults with developmental disabilities find housing and the support they need to live independently. I back them up on finance, technology, and operations. On track to gross $1M this year.
Co-founded with a designer friend in the evenings while I still worked at Cincinnati Insurance. Ledgerist (Android personal finance) launched first; Convertr (iOS and Android unit converter) followed. A million downloads each, Apple staff pick in several countries, Amazon app of the day.
I'm passionate about finding the intersection of each team member's goals and strengths with those of the organization.
I'm not afraid to give honest and direct feedback. Being a straight shooter isn't a license to be a jerk. It's about having the courage to speak truthfully and directly, while still providing support and empowering my team.
I create cultures of growth, transparency, and shared success where every team member is empowered to achieve their full potential.
I came into the industry through a non-traditional path. I started with two years of Electrical Engineering Technology at the University of Cincinnati. I was the first person in my family to attend university, but I was in the wrong program for what I wanted to do.
Unable to afford starting over, I became a rater for an insurance company. From there, I was hired onto a software team trying to automate the work I was doing. I took on progressively more technical roles and found that I had a knack for picking up new technologies and languages.
Being a fast learner isn't just about raw intelligence or aptitude. It's developing a mindset of curiosity, adaptability, and a willingness to learn from others.
My most important responsibility is to serve as the "communicator-in-chief" for the people I lead.
I work hard to distill our vision, mission, and values into an easy-to-understand paradigm that resonates with everyone. Our goals are clear and ingrained in our culture.
Using Seth Godin's definition of culture: 'people like us do things like this...', my job is to influence the things people like us do. I look for different ways to emphasize our message and principles, to the point that my teams sometimes roll their eyes.
From the early days of tinkering with my Vendex computer to getting my hands on my first cell phone, I've been fascinated by the transformative power of technology.
I found myself drawn to emerging technologies like 3D printing, machine learning, blockchain, and, most recently, Generative AI. I am always seeking out new opportunities to learn and grow, both personally and professionally.
Technology is more than just a tool. It's an incredible force for change with the power to shape the future in ways we can't even imagine. I am passionate about exploring the potential of new technologies and working to apply them in meaningful ways that can make a positive impact on people's lives.
Home is Hebron, Kentucky with my wife and our three young kids. We spend a lot of time on the road together — exploring new places and making memories in our RV whenever we can carve out the time.
When I'm not keeping up with the kids, I'm usually playing golf, picking up an instrument, or fixing things around the house. I also love to get lost in a good book — especially space opera or fantasy — and I'll happily talk shop about a custom-built gaming PC with anyone who'll listen.
I'm hard at work at my current role at Kin, but I'm always open to new challenges. If you've got an interesting problem you think I can help solve, reach out.