Résumé

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What I do

Solve hard problems with interdisciplinary thinking, technical wisdom, and listening and learning.

OneCity Vancouver

Volunteer, Data Team, Municipal Election 2026

August 2026 – October 2026 (3 months)

Quickly became a key member of the team. Developed many innovative solutions using population and geographic data. Made mini apps and a dashboard to manage hundreds of volunteers on election day.

AI, BigQuery, BigTable, Google Cloud Platform, HTML, LLMs, SQL, Python, TypeScript

Elation Health

Staff Software Engineer, AI

December 2025 – July 2026 (8 months)

Deploying LLMs to cut through the complexities of US medical billing. Some highlights:

• Added the ability to handle US Medicare quality measures, which coordinated both deterministic guardrails and complex LLM prompting.
• Created a statistical model to forecast customer revenue. Medical providers and insurers have complex, often manual procedures with highly variable results. Nevertheless, the model is good even on the customer's first day, and gets better as it learns more about that customer.
• Rewrote evals to better reflect what happens in production, and developed a scenario testing framework to rapidly iterate the system to handle the most complex billing challenges.
• Analyzed, debugged and/or rewrote distributed systems with Python microservices incuding Kafka, Debezium, and Kubernetes. Reduced costly queries, and better orchestrated AI agents.

AI, AWS, Dapr, Distributed Systems, Docker, Github, Golang, Graylog, Kafka, LLMs, MySQL, Postgres, Python, React, Snowflake, TypeScript

Wealthsimple

Staff Software Engineer

December 2024 – February 2025 (3 months)

Hired to kickstart a new team of experienced engineers to address system-wide technical debt. Following an executive leadership change, the team was dissolved.

• Mapped out the company’s complex “financial operating system” backend infrastructure
• Analyzed legacy ledger data and began porting it to a next-generation system

AWS, DataDog, Distributed Systems, Kafka, Kotlin, Oracle, Postgres, Redshift, Temporal

VRChat

Staff Software Engineer

March 2018 – June 2024 (6 years, 3 months)

• Launched multiplatform VRChat, allowing user-contributed content for both Windows VR systems and the Meta Quest. Refactored almost every aspect of the backend and migrated millions of database records to a new schema
• Created the backend and infrastructure for the Impostors system, a fleet of GPU instances that reprocesses tens of thousands of user-submitted avatars per day, in a secure environment
• Stepped in to help a team struggling to port a desktop Unity app to the cloud. Got discouraged developers talking, and scaffolded a cloud architecture, resulting in a working prototype
• Integrated Elasticsearch and scripted it to make complex, fuzzy search possible
• Decreased the time to test the backend by 87%, reduced test boilerplate by 75%, and made build errors more visible and actionable
• Led the two-factor authentication project, working closely with VR engineers, designing the UX, and writing code for the backend and web frontend
• Prototyped a system to detect stolen content, using a simple machine learning algorithm
• In my first month, saved the company my entire yearly salary

AWS, Amplitude, Bash, C#, Cloudflare, CSS, Distributed systems, Docker, DigitalOcean, ECS, Elasticsearch, Github, GitHub Actions, Go, HTML, IaC, InfluxDB, Lambda, Linux, Node.js, OpenSearch, MongoDB, Packer, PowerShell, Python, React.js, Redux, S3, SES, SQS, Terraform, Unity, VictoriaMetrics, Windows

Square

Software Consultant

July 2019 – March 2020 (8 months, part-time)

• Developed a system to cryptographically sign iOS applications with credentials stored remotely in a hardware security module (HSM), based on my isign open source library
• Managed one subcontractor, my former CTO at a previous company

cryptography, iOS, Linux, MacOS, Python, Swift

Bench Accounting

Software Engineering Team Lead

March 2017 – March 2018 (1 year)

• Led a project to migrate some customer data from a myriad collection of spreadsheets to one data store, managed by a Scala service and React frontend.
• Created a dashboard for internal accounting team performance
• Spearheaded the transition from CoffeeScript to modern JavaScript
• Improved and standardized hiring practices

Agile, Bash, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Jenkins, JSP, Leadership, Linux, Node.js, React.js, Scala, sbt, SQL

Sauce Labs, Real Device Cloud

Senior Software Engineer/Interim Team Lead

December 2014 – March 2017 (2 years, 4 months)

• Developed a bare metal testing-as-a-service platform, that allowed customers to run automated software tests on physical iOS and Android devices.
• Created and open sourced isign (~700 Github stars), a tool to cryptographically sign iOS app builds in the cloud on Linux, without expensive MacOS servers. First team to successfully analyze this protocol and release a compatible tool

Agile, Android, Bash, Distributed Systems, iOS, Leadership, Linux, MacOS, MySQL, Python, SQL

GeoMind

Solo Developer

April 2012 – December 2015 (3 years, 7 months, part-time)

• Invented an algorithm which sifted through millions of geotagged photos and directed users to interesting places. Used a very early version of React for a cross-platform mobile experience.

AWS, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Leaflet.js, Linux, Node.js, Postgres, PostGIS, React.js, RDS, SQL

Full Stack Foundry

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

June 2013 – December 2013 (7 months, part-time)

• Helped evaluate opportunities and make connections for a seed investment firm.

AWS, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Leaflet.js, Linux, Node.js, Postgres, PostGIS, React.js, RDS, SQL

Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)

Software Engineer

December 2009 – January 2012 (2 years, 2 months)

• Rewrote or upgraded all systems related to uploading, licensing, managing and storing millions of media files, dramatically increasing usability and correctness in licensing
• Advocated and introduced complex JavaScript frontends to Wikipedia
• Created a JavaScript library to internationalize frontends to hundreds of different languages, now used across Wikipedia (banana-i18n, formerly jquery.i18n, 700+ Github stars)

CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL, Node.js, PHP, SQL

Yahoo

Senior Software Engineer, (Upcoming.org, Flickr)

December 2006 – April 2009 (2 years, 5 months)

• Backend engineer for Flickr’s first iPhone-targeted user experience
• Improved integration between Flickr and Yahoo-internal payment systems
• Won a Hack Day award for a Flickr mapping tool
• Integrated Upcoming’s user-contributed local events into Yahoo’s main search engine
• Migrated Upcoming’s event database to true geographic search, rather than tagged cities
• Modernized Upcoming’s user experience, using JavaScript to avoid page loads

Apache, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Linux, PHP, MySQL, SQL

Google

Software Engineer, Google Checkout

September 2005 – October 2006 (1 year, 1 month)

• Modified Google’s sign-in system, GAIA, to securely collect payment information
• Internationalized the Checkout system to handle non-US addresses, currencies, and tax practices.
• Created payment flows for various Google products, such as Video and Earth

Bash, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, MySQL, SQL

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Communication Studies, Spring 2000
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec

Languages

English, French