About
I’m an engineering leader in Brooklyn. I’ve been shipping software for twenty-five years — the last ten of them running teams as a CTO or VP of Engineering — and I’ve stayed hands-on the whole way: architecture, code review, and production code, alongside the hiring and the roadmaps.
Most of my work sits where media meets infrastructure: live news on every screen at Cheddar, a 1,500-display campus TV network rebuilt on Apple TVs and Raspberry Pis, real-time group voice at Liminal, and a rendering pipeline at Allstar that ran live game instances on hundreds of bare-metal servers to cut esports highlights for about five million people a month.
Away from the day job, I organized GORUCO, New York’s Ruby conference, from 2015 to 2018. And I’ve been on GitHub since April 2008 — user #7132, if you’re counting.
Experience
2024–26
team 18 · 5 squads
Allstar Gaming · VP Engineering
Server-side video platform generating automatic highlight clips for the biggest esports titles: Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Fortnite, Dota 2, and Overwatch.
- Built a rendering pipeline that ran live game instances across hundreds of bare-metal servers — replay in, in-engine capture, post-processing out — sustaining 2–3 finished clips per second at peak.
- Scaled to ~5M monthly active users through partners including FACEIT, u.gg, op.gg, Leetify, and HLTV, plus 200K using Allstar directly.
Liminal · CTO
Group-therapy platform (formerly Quilt) connecting clients with certified professionals for live sessions.
- Built a real-time voice platform that scaled to hundreds of concurrent participants in panel-style sessions.
- Replaced a slow REST backend with a Rails-based GraphQL API, cutting p95 query times from 500ms to 50ms.
2019–22
team 50 · 7 squads
Altice USA · VP Technology, News + Advertising
Ran engineering for News (Cheddar, News 12) and Advertising (a4 Media) after Altice acquired Cheddar.
- Consolidated a fragmented ad-tech org — three-plus separate product teams — into a single multi-squad team behind one product, with TDD and CI/CD as the default.
- Moved News 12 to an in-house CMS; news12.com revenue and pageviews rose 20% within a month of launch.
Cheddar · CTO
First engineering hire at the live-news startup; grew the team to fifteen and stayed hands-on through acquisition by Altice USA.
- Shipped apps for iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku, Samsung Tizen, and DirecTV set-tops, plus custom CMSes feeding video to 40+ distribution partners.
- Acquired and overhauled Rate My Professors: re-architected Groovy/Grails into Go, React, and GraphQL, growing annual revenue from $3M to $5M.
- Turned MTVU into CheddarU — migrated a 1,500-screen campus network from satellite to IP (Apple TVs for video, Raspberry Pis for control) with an IoT platform to manage the fleet.
KnowMe · Head of Engineering
Led five iOS engineers on a video-storytelling social app; architected the AVFoundation pipeline that let people shoot and edit video, photos, and music into short, shareable stories.
Movable Ink · Senior Software Engineer
Built features for the email-marketing platform behind campaigns for American Express, Home Depot, and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Eastmedia · Senior Software Engineer
Web products for Limited Brands, The Webby Awards, and Ford Models; acqui-hired into Movable Ink.
Earlier: financial market-data systems at Collaborative Software Initiative and web platforms at the University of Pittsburgh, where I also studied computer science (1997–2001).