Senior Principal Software Engineer with extensive experience building scalable systems, internal platforms, and developer-facing tools. A curious generalist with a track record of leading architecture efforts, improving developer experience, and driving cross-functional impact across infrastructure and application domains.
Founder,
March 2025 - Present
| GrayM Systems | Raleigh, NC |
- Founded technology company to explore entrepreneurial opportunities while maintaining hands-on technical expertise
- Built LangGuessr game using modern JavaScript, Python, and cloud infrastructure demonstrating full-stack capabilities
- Provided strategic cloud architecture and platform planning expertise for a growing technology company
- Applied enterprise-grade architecture patterns to help optimize cloud infrastructure and development workflows
| PROJECTS:
+ LangGuessr
+ Cloud Architecture Engagement
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Distinguished Engineer,
November 2024 - February 2025
Digital Experience, ShareFile, Engineering | Progress Software | Raleigh, NC |
- Progress Software bought ShareFile from CSG
- Helped with transition, cross training, and writing documentation
| PROJECTS:
+ Transition
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Senior Principal Software Engineer,
August 2022 - October 2024
ShareFile, Solution Platform, Engineering | Cloud Software Group | Raleigh, NC |
- Started at Citrix but was soon acquired by CSG
- Evaluated and selected Integration PaaS vendor
- Designed a new enterprise architecture for ShareFile
- Built system-wide event bus using DAPR, Kafka, and Cloud Events that triggers Domino Workflows
- Architected several microservices using Piral, React, NestJS, NodeJS, DAPR, Kafka, and MongoDB such as Integrations, Information Intake, Data Tables, and User Defined Forms
- Organized and ran architecture review boards and design committees to facilitate collaboration
- Evangelized internal platform architecture as a product, driving cross-team adoption and enabling scalable self-service capabilities across Engineering, Product, and Design
- Mentored engineers, participated in design and code reviews, actively explored the next solutions, and fixed the tougher problems
- Introduced Backstage as a developer knowledge base and architecture portal
| PROJECTS:
+ Enterprise Architecture
+ Integrations
+ Event Bus
+ Information Intake
+ User-Defined Data Tables
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Director - Lead Engineer,
May 2020 - August 2022
CTO, Cloud Services, Core Engineering | Deutsche Bank | Cary, NC |
- Completed Global Enterprise Engineer program to be in the top 5% of the bank's engineers
- Created and led a multi-region engineering team to build and operate a GCP Control Plane
- Designed internal Landing Zone platform as a product, enabling developer self-service and safe, policy-driven GCP provisioning via GitOps workflows with GitHub Actions and Terraform Enterprise
- Secured Terraform Enterprise with SAML, OAuth against AAD and later GitHub OIDC to meet banking regulations
- Architected mechanisms to allow the platform to be safely extended by the community via inner-sourcing
- Delivered Landing Zones to 250+ application and infrastructure teams
- Constructed standardized Terraform module authoring framework
- Regularized GCP organization management via Terraform Infrastructure as Code
- Drove platform adoption through enablement campaigns—producing docs, training, internal events, and cultivating platform champions across 250+ engineering teams
- Participated in compliance audits
| PROJECTS:
+ GCP Control Plane
+ Landing Zones
+ Module Authoring Framework
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Vice President - Lead Engineer,
February 2019 - May 2020
Global Transaction Banking, Digital Office, Data Platform | Deutsche Bank | Cary, NC |
- Created a Data Platform out of native Azure components, namely Databricks, DataLake, SQL DataWarehouse, EventHub, Monitor, and AzureML
- Automated and orchestrated Data Platform using Azure DevOps, Terraform, Docker, and Ansible
- Evaluated Cloud Custodian in Azure
| PROJECTS:
+ GTB Data Platform
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Senior Principal Software Engineer,
September 2016 - February 2019
Automotive division, Cloud Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure team | Nuance Communications | Raleigh, NC |
- Swype's Connect Operations team moved to the hosting group for the Mobile division, which later became to the new Automotive division
- Remained in 1st tier on-call rotation for Swype Connect
- Implemented Foreman for system management and provisioning of bare metal, ESX, and Azure instances
- Deployed infrastructure world-wide in Azure using purpose-built and reusable Terraform modules
- Integrated Katello for management of system and application content across all datacenters
- Rolled out FreeIPA to centrally manage SSL certificates, Kerberos, DNS, system auth (sssd), and application auth
- Designed and built proof-of-concept multi-tenant compute platform using Mesos, Marathon, Consul, Calico, HAProxy and Docker to support auto-scaling and blue-green deployments of microservices
- Architected a solution to provide applications and systems "Visibility" for our customers using ELK for logs, Graphite for metrics, and Sensu for alerts
- Built and maintained centralized, per-datacenter, secure, multi-tenant, ELK-stack clusters for "Visibility" using Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, ElastAlert, and ReadonlyREST
- Created go app that generated Sensu checks for services running inside Kubernetes, querying API for services annotated with configmaps that describe alert thresholds
- Deployed Jenkins 2.0 integrated with GitLab for CICD. Built shared pipelines (as code) to build all our RPMs, Docker images, and Puppet modules
- Made and/or used rspec-tested Puppet 4 modules to deploy all of the above
- Authored Puppet 4 "base" system module to manage all fundamental aspects of our systems, including: puppet, mco, auth, sshd, time, osquery, limits, firewall, auditd, packages, sysctl, monitoring, logs, SELinux, DNS, and metrics
- Used Packer to bake Azure images for faster provisioning
- Setup a CI/CD pipeline to package each customer's "visibility" configurations (Kibana dashboards, Logstash configs, ElastAlert rules, and Grafana dashboards) and install them on the appropriate clusters
- Documented our platforms and stacks, evangelized them to our customers, and assisted with customer on-boarding
| PROJECTS:
+ Mobile Compute Platform
+ Mobile "Visibility" stack
+ Mobile Shared and Core Services
+ Jenkins 2.0 CI/CD pipelines
+ Kubernetes Sensu Checks
+ Swype Connect
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Principal Software Engineer,
January 2012 - September 2016
Mobile division, TextIO R&D, Connect Operations team | Nuance Communications | Durham, NC |
- Swype was acquired by Nuance!
- Continued the development and improvement of the Swype Connect API, with the main focus on performance, allowing us to scale to hundreds of millions users
- Improved visibility of our connected services, using Graphite, statsd, collectd, Grafana, Kibana, and SNMP, giving us insight and trending data into how our application is performing and being used
- Switched from EC2 Auto-Scale to a Puppet managed, but manually scaled system
- Migrated SwypeConnect from AWS to an in-house, managed ESX cluster
- Used Hadoop and Pig to mine Cassandra for application usage and trend data
- Built second API in Go, wrapping core business logic written in C, to support real-time predictions in the cloud
- Assumed responsibility of legacy Java/Spring language database management system
- Built server support for on-device storefront
- Deployed and support applications in Chinese datacenters
| PROJECTS:
+ Swype Connect
+ Language Lab
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Senior Systems Engineer,
June 2011 - December 2011
Engineering, Connect Operations team | Swype | Durham, NC |
- Came on board to lead the effort of building a high-scale web-service to support tens of millions of mobile transactions per day, to enhance phones using the Swype keyboard
- Built a multi-datacenter, geographically redundant, Python/WSGI web-service to support millions of write-heavy requests per day, backed by a similarly redundant Cassandra cluster
- Hosted in Amazon Web Services, for ease of build-out and managed infrastructure, utilizing EC2, AutoScale, CloudFront, CloudWatch, S3, Route53, RDS, ElasticCache
- Used EC2 auto-scaling to ensure a timely response to customer demands
- Built a true DevOps team, using PagerDuty, Nagios, Graylog, SyslogNG, and EC2, plus our stateless custom web service that we both developed and operated in Production
| PROJECTS:
+ Swype Connect
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Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure
: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, DAPR, Helm
Courses in Java, LISP, 3D Graphics, A.I., Assembly, Software Engineering, Algorithms, Hardware Architecture, and Computation
Graduate & undergraduate courses in C, C++, compiler design, computer graphics, and multimedia design.