A $750M product suite across MyLab, Mastering, Revel and MathXL. More than 250 engineers, globally distributed.

• Led the convergence architecture for a $750M+ product suite and a globally distributed organization of more than 250, managing directors, managers, architects and senior technical leaders.
• Owned hiring, retention, performance, coaching, succession and organizational design, and developed several engineers into managers, so the bench running delivery was one I had built rather than inherited.The Architecture of Engagement18 min
• Set the direction and architecture for generative AI products on OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock, which my teams took from proof of concept to production in under six months across student, instructor and content workflows. They moved the numbers the business is measured on: learning outcomes up about 20 percent, drop-out down 20 percent and NPS up 25 points.
• Built one foundational learning platform across four converging product lines using the strangler pattern, with unified data, MLOps, a shared generative AI toolkit and reusable API-driven building blocks adopted across the business.Four Platforms, One Lakehouse7 min
• Owned the AI product roadmap, prioritized use cases by business value, and carried revenue ownership for the MathXL product line.
• Drove modernization, cloud transformation and automation delivering $23M in annual operating cost reduction while holding 99.95 percent availability on Tier 0 platforms, including a 26TB SQL estate moved to AWS in under six months with zero downtime.I wrote this up for AWSaws.amazon.com
• Ran large-scale A/B experimentation and model evaluation on scalable AWS data pipelines, and directed an AWS Neptune knowledge graph powering the recommendation engine, linking learners, content and outcomes.
• Brought a major product suite back in house from vendor operation, standing up the internal team and the operating model to run it. Extreme optimization of what the platform actually needed cut the contractor base by 95 percent with zero operational impact, removing a recurring vendor cost and returning control of the roadmap.
• Held the multi-year roadmap by managing the balance of permanent engineers and augmented capacity, using partners and staff augmentation where speed or a temporary skill gap justified it and converting to in-house ownership once the capability was established.
• Established an architecture and AI governance portal on Backstage with Amazon Q, and partnered with Legal and Compliance on responsible AI and on WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility, which in an education business is an obligation rather than a preference.
• Mentored technical leads to make sound calls without me, sat in architecture, code, security and operational reviews, and arbitrated the decisions that were stuck, including several outside my own group.
• Led the change management that made the consolidation land, because a converged platform only pays back once four organizations agree to stand on it.

Consumer photo and personalization platform at 94M active profiles, with Q4 peak as the defining constraint.

• Led the conversion of a monolith to microservices using the strangler pattern, carving out eight core domain-driven services with explicit bounded contexts and choosing a purpose-fit datastore for each rather than one database for all of them. Ran the migration against the AWS Well-Architected Framework, with zero downtime on Tier 0 systems in nine months, saving $20M a year across backend, web and mobile.Strangling the Monolith12 min
• Made the business case for consolidating the Identity and Access Management platform, secured the investment, and led the architects and principal engineers directly through delivery, onto OIDC, OAuth and JWT with AWS Cognito for 94M active profiles, enabling stateless high-performance applications and cutting authentication latency in half with no downtime.Identity at Scale11 min
• Key contributor launching Identity, mobile commerce, the eCommerce platform and the single-platform approach, integrating Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud and exposing capability through GraphQL.
• Solved the thundering herd problem through traffic shaping built from standard components, and built distributed session management to sustain Q4 peak traffic and enable zero-downtime deployment, clearing tech debt that had been open for years.Surviving Peak20 min
• Created an Architecture as a Service portal with auto-generated architecture diagrams, giving a single view with drill-down for planning and transformation.
• Established standards and design patterns, Architecture Design Records and architecture reviews across the organization, and owned the non-functional requirements for most features.
• Led platform evaluation for IAM, eCommerce and infrastructure, built the selection metric and ran the vendor conversations through to decision.

Built the Education as a Service platform. Joined as Senior Software Engineer, then Staff Solutions Architect, then Principal Solutions Architect.

• Initial member of the platform team that built the Education as a Service platform from the ground up, technically and organizationally, driving requirements, problem definition and the proofs of concept that were folded back into it.
• Major contributor making the platform L-2 multi-tenant on AWS, scaling from zero to more than 300K concurrent users within 18 months.
• Migrated the legacy platforms onto the target platform, lowering operational cost and shortening time to market for new features.
• Architected features with instrumentation as a core tenet, producing data in a unified format so teams could build adaptive applications, an early form of the personalization now standard in AI. Built the big data platform and analysis layer underneath it on Hadoop.The patents this became11 granted
• Conceptualized and built a dynamic configuration management system, an aggregation framework, a scalable rule engine and a third-party integration framework, and re-architected the templating layer and admin console to be modular and extensible.
• Implemented an OWASP-based security filter, an OAuth authentication and authorization framework on Spring and a fine-grained ACL mechanism.
• Co-owned the non-functional requirements for the platform.

Consumer travel planning startup.

• Built a unified server and client-side rendering framework on JSF, EJB and MySQL, enabling dynamic snippet rendering while meeting SEO needs and ranking higher in organic search.
• Used that framework to redesign major parts of the site to scale better in a far shorter time frame, and built vertical search and inspiration frameworks for content discovery.
• Integrated Facebook and Twitter, which lifted user engagement.

IPTV middleware and the application development kit built on it.

• Worked on next-generation IPTV middleware and built the application development kit for set-top boxes running slimmed-down Linux and miniature browsers, on a JSP and Struts MVC backend over MySQL and Oracle.
• Wrote the client-side JavaScript framework for the front end years before React or its contemporaries existed, and shipped it as an SDK that made applications materially more responsive on hardware with very little memory or CPU to spare.
• Delivered end-to-end features across the full lifecycle: electronic programming guide, local and network PVR, Live TV and pausing Live TV, account management and payment gateway integration.
• Integrated DRM with external vendors such as Widevine through a Java plugin mechanism, and led onshore and offshore teams through the full development cycle.
• Introduced the higher-revenue features on the roadmap, taking most of them end to end.

Enterprise services and internal engineering tooling.

• Built an internal ticket-management application with complex workflows and introduced visualization, plus an easy-to-use knowledge base for internal users.
• Worked on engagement-model workflows for managing intake projects with appropriate access control, end to end, and on HP's version of TeamTrack defect management across the J2EE and Oracle layers.

Sensor networks, edge and real-time streaming.

• Built and deployed an AI-connected IoT platform directly with customers, from solution design through production, starting with an elderly care use case.
• Owned the full zero-to-one loop, hands-on across the stack, from architecture and code to talking with customers and deciding what to build next.
• Networking-heavy work across sensor networks, edge and real-time streaming.