SummaryTechnical innovation leader with 20+ years of experience building scalable systems and leading engineering organizations - from hands-on architect to VP. Demonstrated ability to stay current on the cutting edge (local LLM infrastructure, multi-agent workflows) while scaling teams and empowering others. US Patent holder in codeless automation with a consistent track record of optimizing outcomes across people (mentorship, team development), process (SDLC, onboarding, tooling), and technology (architecture, AI infrastructure, cost optimization).
Five+ years leading Labs/R&D divisions (Applause Labs 2019-2021, HappyFunCorp Labs 2025-2026), combining deep technical expertise with organizational leadership. Built Labs operations from the ground up at two companies - defining strategy, recruiting talent, and delivering IP that drove business impact. Active open-source maintainer - never lost my passion for coding while building and mentoring teams.
Currently focused on local LLM deployment and multi-agent workflows - built ai-tools repository for managing llama.cpp (llama-server) deployments with specialized agent roles (Architect, Implement, Scribe) using specialized models (Cipher, Sage). Recently published thought leadership on AI-assisted development in Techstrong.ai ("Build Fast, Then Build Right"), The AI Journal ("From Prototype to Production"), DEVOPSdigest (2026 Predictions), and InfoWorld (nonfunctional requirements for AI agents).
Deep expertise spanning full-stack development (React, Next.js, Python/FastAPI, Go), distributed systems architecture, and engineering leadership at scale (Wayfair Transportation: 50 engineers, Applause: multiple teams). B.A. in Computer Science, Environmental Science & Math from Westfield State University.
Professional ExperienceVice President of Technical Architecture & Head Of Labs (09/25 - 04/26)
HappyFunCorp - New York, NY
A NYC-based Product Engineering Firm
- Promoted from Director to VP - expanded scope to include full R&D division while maintaining hands-on technical involvement in architecture and AI infrastructure. Continued pattern of building Labs operations following successful Applause Labs tenure (2019-2021).
- Empowered Team Through Labs Model:
- Built HFC Labs operations from ground up - recruited/mentored engineers, defined R&D priorities with the advisory team, and created framework for prototype-to-production pipelines
- Mentored staff engineers and engineering managers on architectural patterns while staying current with AI/ML technologies
- Positioned Labs as both innovation engine and business development asset - aligned R&D with client engagement strategy
- Led HappyFunCorp's R&D division (HFC Labs) alongside VP of Technical Architecture responsibilities, focusing on rapid prototyping, AI-driven solutions, and production efficiency gains through innovative tooling.
- Agentic Commerce POC:
- Developed chat/inference-based furniture shopping experience demonstrating agentic commerce capabilities
- Built conversational AI interface for product discovery, recommendation, and guided purchasing flow
- Validated prototype with internal stakeholders and potential clients, showcasing HFC's AI prototyping capabilities/partnership model
- HFC AI Offering Development:
- Architected and developed plan for HFC's AI service offering, defining go-to-market strategy and technical capabilities
- Created framework for AI consulting services, prototype-to-production pipelines, and client engagement models
- Aligned Labs R&D with business development to position HFC as leader in AI-driven product engineering
- Balanced rapid prototyping ("vibe coding") with architectural discipline to avoid technical debt accumulation
- AI Infrastructure & Local LLM Lab:
- Built local AI lab infrastructure running OpenCode, Open WebUI, OpenClaw after 1+ year of intensive Claude + Claude Code usage
- Developed ai-tools repository for managing llama.cpp deployments with multi-model architecture
- Implemented specialized agent roles (Architect/plan-only, Implement/full-tools, Scribe/docs) with opencode-ai framework
- Achieved significant reductions in external API costs through strategic local model deployment and quantization optimization
- Thought Leadership & Industry Engagement:
- Published in Techstrong.ai on AI-assisted development realities and maintainability challenges
- Contributed to The AI Journal on prototype-to-production transitions in AI-driven development
- Commentary in DEVOPSdigest 2026 Predictions on velocity-to-veracity cultural shift
- InfoWorld contribution on nonfunctional requirements for autonomous AI agents
- Transitioned from Director role after successful 3-year full-time tenure (11+ years total with HFC across contract and full-time engagements)
- Assisted Sales team and closed multiple deals, leveraging technical expertise to land new clients and upsell pre-existing clients
Director of Technical Architecture (08/23 - 09/25)
HappyFunCorp - New York, NY
A NYC-based Product Engineering Firm
- Stayed hands-on while scaling leadership - owned technical architecture decisions across multiple client engagements while mentoring engineering managers and staff engineers.
- Supported Sales efforts with technical deep-dives, proposal reviews, and client presentations to help close deals.
- Led architecture review board and established technical standards for code quality, scalability, and security.
- Mentored engineering managers and staff engineers on architectural patterns and system design.
- Bridged gap between product requirements and technical implementation across distributed teams.
- Early HFC Labs Initiatives:
- Pioneered AI-assisted development workflows that later evolved into formal HFC Labs R&D division
- Established foundation for rapid prototyping capabilities using commercial generative AI solutions and local LLM infrastructure
Staff Software Engineer [Contract] (06/23 - 08/23)
HappyFunCorp - New York, NY
A NYC-based Product Engineering Firm
- Returned to HappyFunCorp as contractor to address critical client needs before transitioning to full-time Director role.
- High-Visibility Client Engagement:
- Led development of Claims Customer & Management portal for a major client under extremely tight timeline - critical deadline driven by Petition Date requirements
- Worked closely with client stakeholders and leadership to deliver on an accelerated schedule with high visibility
- Successfully delivered functionality meeting strict regulatory/administrative deadlines
Vice President Of Engineering (04/22 - 03/23)
ibble - Austin, TX
A social media app that brings conversation to life over video, audio, images and text.
- Led both the Product and Engineering disciplines - promoted from Director based on demonstrated impact.
- Launched the ibble mobile-application in both Mexico and Canada.
- Worked with Marketing to launch an updated App-Store and Website presence.
- Optimized People, Process, and Technology:
- Technology: Created multiple tools to automate manual processes, optimizing data-migrations, data-backfills, and production flows
- Process: Established automated CI/CD pipelines and monitoring systems for improved reliability
- People: Continued team scaling with focus on cross-functional collaboration between Product and Engineering
- Continued focus on optimizing cost while maintaining or increasing stability and reliability of both the backend and frontend services / applications.
Director Of Engineering (11/21 - 04/22)
ibble - Austin, TX
A social media app that brings conversation to life over video, audio, images and text.
- Analyzed, and documented, pre-existing infrastructure and software architecture to develop a plan to level things up, deprecate un-used / under-utilized services, reinforce critical components and optimize costs.
- Optimized Across People, Process, and Technology:
- Technology: Led the re-platforming effort to migrate from Heroku to GCP, reducing infrastructure costs while improving scalability
- Process: Established onboarding documentation, tooling, levels & responsibilities, team Agile processes and SDLC
- People: Scaled team with mix of near-shore/off-shore contractors, interns, and FTEs - established clear career paths
Head Of Applause Labs (10/19 - 11/21)
Applause - Framingham, MA
Worldwide leader in crowdtesting and digital quality.
- Built and led Applause Labs - the company's R&D division focused on rapid prototyping and innovation. Recruited and developed a team of engineers, empowering them to explore emerging technologies while delivering business-impacting IP.
- Built-out IP and identified new capabilities enhancing the business:
- Accessibility Recommender / Fixer
- Automated Bug Triage / Test Case Generation from Bug Reports - foundational work leading to US Patent 2024/0411670 A1 for 'SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR AUTOMATING TEST AND VALIDITY' (co-inventors: Robert S. Mason, Leonardo Covarrubias)
- Crowd Services (GigE)
- Emotional AI
- Live / Just In Time Testing (JITT)
- Live Streamed Testing (think: Twitch [for Testers])
- [Applause] Quality Score (AQS)
- Patent: US Patent 2024/0411670 A1 - Codeless Automation:
- Granted during HFC tenure (2024) but invented at Applause Labs (2019-2021)
- Systems and methods for automating test and validity through codeless patterns
- Early exploration of AI-assisted test generation, bug triage, and requirement validation
- Investigated emerging capabilities rapidly, discarding projects that did not deliver expected value (fail-fast methodology).
- Focused on rapid prototyping / research to determine Complexity, Technical Feasibility, and documented results for validation with stakeholders including the CEO.
- Key Publications & Press:
- Developed press releases published in DevopsDigest, Forbes, App Developer Magazine
- Speaking engagements on Future of Automation, AI in eCommerce, Why Human Element Remains Essential in Applied AI
- Established pattern for Labs operations later replicated at HappyFunCorp (2025-2026).
Staff Software Engineer [Contract] (05/20 - 11/20)
HappyFunCorp - New York, NY
A NYC-based Product Engineering Firm
- Addressed infrastructure and application scalability concerns in the TezLab backend.
- Developed, integrated and later open-sourced the sidekiq-max-jobs gem.
- Scaling TezLab
Senior Director Of Engineering (01/19 - 11/21)
Applause - Framingham, MA
Worldwide leader in crowdtesting and digital quality.
- Promoted to Senior Director - expanded scope from leading one team to overseeing multiple engineering disciplines across the organization. Continued leadership while transitioning into Head of Applause Labs role.
Director Of Engineering (12/17 - 01/19)
Applause - Framingham, MA
Worldwide leader in crowdtesting and digital quality.
- Promoted to Senior Director by end of tenure - expanded scope from leading one team to overseeing multiple engineering disciplines across the organization.
- Empowered Team Members Through Process & Mentorship:
- Mentored engineers through career transitions - several promoted to staff/principal roles
- Created standardized development processes that reduced ramp-up time for new hires
- Established cross-functional collaboration between QA, Platform Delivery, and community QA teams
- Partnered with product management and delivery teams to align and prioritize current and future new product development initiatives in support of business objectives.
- Worked with cross functional engineering teams including QA, Platform Delivery and community QA to plan and execute large scale application additions and improvements.
- AngularJS / EJS to Angular conversion(s)
- Database capacity planning & Tuning (for: MySQL & PostgreSQL)
- JDK 8 to 11 upgrade(s)
- Mesosphere DC/OS migration
- MySQL to TiDB migration
- MySQL upgrade(s)
- Node.js 0.10.49 to 12 upgrade(s)
- Platform bootstrap process (expedite onboarding / day-one setup process)
- PostgreSQL upgrade(s)
- Python 2 to 3 converion(s)
- Re-imagined Tester Search and delivered [a] Tester Recommendation Engine
- Ruby & Rails upgrade(s)
- Addressed numerous scalability and correctness issues across the Organization.
- Developed a practical and working knowledge of business processes; interacted with key business partners to recommend solutions that best meet the strategic needs of the business.
- Developed and applied consistent, standardized development processes that were regularly updated through lessons learned from previous projects.
- Developed software development strategy utilizing industry standards. Created roadmap and timing of implementation of the roadmap based on business requirements and strategy.
- Managed other managers, team leads and individual contributors.
- Motivated, led and developed a team of diverse individuals with a variety of experience levels and skill sets.
- Managed software project planning and allocation of resources.
Engineering Manager - Customer Information (Customer Data, Testing and Analytics + Tracking) (09/17 - 12/17)
Wayfair, LLC - Boston, MA
An American e-commerce company that sells furniture, home furnishings, luggage, toys, pet items and more.
- Worked closely with business stake-holders and tech-leads on road-mapping, forecasting and developing hiring plans.
- Worked closely with senior-management and tech-leads to establish training / on-boarding plans focused on improving efficiency of, growing skills of, and retaining, tech-leads as well as individual-contributors.
- Held regular Staff Meeting(s), partnering closely with business stake-holders and tech-leads to adapt to supplement forecasting efforts.
- Responsible for many existing, and several new, high profile projects.
- B2B Identification / Outreach (scoring)
- Customer Facts
- Customer Segmentation
- Device-Mapping (Customer -> Device)
- Dynamic Phone Number
- Multi Armed Bandit testing (as a standard test[-type] offering)
- Real-time User Level Bidding
- Real-time and Batch [Event] Uploaders
- Web, Mobile Web & App Tracking
- Recognized for my efforts, after about one year in the marketing engineering department, I was able to increase my scope and take over as the engineering manager for the Tracking team.
Software Architect / Engineering Leader - Customer Identity + Testing and Analytics (11/16 - 09/17)
Wayfair, LLC - Boston, MA
An American e-commerce company that sells furniture, home furnishings, luggage, toys, pet items and more.
- Led the Data-Store POC initiative, working closely with one senior and one junior engineer, and others from varying disciplines across the organization, to evaluate five data-stores, ultimately presenting our findings to the CTO, Chief Architect, VPs and Directors for consideration / approval.
- Dove in head first to new domain / technical challenges.
- Instrumented, and was hands on in diagnosing and addressing issues, and ultimately rewriting, our "Cart Abandonment" topology (a significant source of revenue YoY).
- Evolved the Customer Information Service (CIS) [Python / Flask] to be both more maintainable / extensible as well as more performant.
- Aided in significantly scaling up / out a number of other Java and Python applications that the Customer Identity & Testing and Analytics team(s) owned.
- Focused on the career growth of direct reports.
- Consistently held one-on-one's with all members of the team providing guidance both technically and non-technically about how to build their experience / skills.
- Regularly involved in design / architectural meetings and the code review process.
- Enabled team members to take [calculated] risks, in order to learn and build technical skills.
- Recognized for my efforts, within months of joining the marketing engineering department, I was able to increase my scope and take over as the engineering lead for the Testing and Analytics (A/A & A/B testing framework) team.
Software Architect / Engineering Leader - Transportation (06/15 - 11-16)
Wayfair, LLC - Boston, MA
An American e-commerce company that sells furniture, home furnishings, luggage, toys, pet items and more.
- Rapidly grew the Transportation engineering team from 10 engineers to approaching 50 engineers within a year - promoted twice during this tenure (Architect → Lead → Manager), demonstrating both technical depth and emerging leadership capabilities.
- Coordinated onboarding for engineers both in Boston and our sister office in Berlin, Germany.
- Partnered with business, operations and engineering leaders to develop plans about how to evolve the Transportation platform and team.
- Focused on the rapid career growth of direct / in-direct reports.
- Consistently held one-on-one's with all members of the team providing guidance both technically and non-technically about how to build their experience / skills.
- Regularly involved in design / architectural meetings and the code review process.
- Led and contributed to multiple process refinements.
- Onboarding: Prior to my arrival this was 2 to 3 hours involving 1 or 2 senior engineers, due to our rapid growth this did not scale and in reality, due the complexity of our system was not sufficient. As a result we now have a comprehensive track with multiple topics including many business and technical deep-dives.
- Scrum of Scrums: As the team grew in size, holding a mono-scrum was no longer possible. As we broke into independent scrums / teams we lost visibility into what other teams within the department working on. As a result the "Scrum of Scrums" was born. This meeting included both business stake-holders and engineering leads, allowing sharing, review and collaboration of / on current cross-functional / multi-discipline objectives.
- Weekly Engineering Update / Monthly Platform Meeting: As the team grew in size, and more specifically specialized, it became difficult for engineers to have a pulse on what each team was working on. Knowledge sharing and Transparency are very important to me as a leader, so after hearing this feedback first-hand from a number of reports and reports of reports the Weekly Update (e-mail summary) and Monthly Platform Meeting (in-person update) were created.
- Ticket Grooming / Requirement Gathering: Worked with business and engineering leaders on the "Definition of Ready" with regards to ticket grooming / requirement gathering. Suggested changes to the overall structure of tickets with a goal of making them more like user stories, including clearly blocked out acceptance criteria, testing criteria as well as go-live / deploy plans.
- Criticals Process: My team's problem area was very data-centric and at times the system got out of sync. To combat this we had a Criticals Rotation. This concept pre-dates my arrival, but it became immediately apparent that it needed an overhaul. During my tenure we switched this from an e-mail list to a Kanban queue, got to the root-causes and made fixes to many of the underlying issues. I felt strong about having every Engineer on the team in the rotation as it provided a tremendous learning opportunity.
- Post-mortems / Retrospectives: At Wayfair we moved fast, at times probably too fast. As a result of our speed, issues / bugs were a fairly regular occurrence. On the surface level, this was fine but the learning opportunity that retrospectives and post-mortems provide was missed / not part of the process. In addition to leading a number of these types of meetings for my team(s), I worked closely with business and engineering leadership to establish guidelines on how and when these types of meetings made sense.
- Stayed Hands-On While Scaling:
- Continued coding and architecting alongside team growth - authored reusable components (Transportation Base Classes, Logging trait, Statistics trait) used across the organization
- Maintained deep technical involvement in critical systems while developing leadership skills
- Balanced people management responsibilities with hands-on design and code reviews
- Involved with future planning / forecasting with regards to Architecture.
- Identified and worked with engineering leadership to introduce the concept of a "Transportation - Platform Team" focused on scalability, monitoring, tools as well as platform / framework evolution.
- Identified a need and short-coming of the current "Remote" development / testing environments and worked very closely with multiple infrastructure leads / engineers on defining / building a "Local" development solution / option. This solution is now used by approximately 50% of Wayfair Engineering and has been successfully proven as the platform of choice for all "Wayfair Labs" groups going forward.
- Developed many re-usable components, in particular the Transportation - Base Classes and Traits
- Became the go to person for many technical topics.
- Isilon: Became an expert / expert resource in the infrastructure and available tools / components by working with all teams involved (4) on refinements to the provisioning / migration process in order to meet an acceptable SLA.
- Logging: Created a re-usable `Logging` component (a `trait`), now used by multiple teams across the company, aimed at simplifying and driving consistency around Kibana logging.
- Statistics / Metrics: Created a re-usable `Statistics` component (a `trait`), now used by multiple teams across the company, aimed at simplifying and driving consistency around Graphite metric logging.
- Involved with future planning / forecasting with regards to Personnel.
- Worked closely with engineering and operations leadship to plan around how and when it made sense to split the engineering team in Berlin.
- Worked closely with operations leadership to plan around when it made sense to split and / or refine the scope of US based teams (recurring).
- Given the success of the "Transportation - Platform Team" worked with engineering leadership to define a plan around creating, and hiring for, a department-wide "Fulfillment - Platform Team."
Principal Software Engineer (08/13 - 06/15)
Sermo - Boston, MA
The #1 social network for doctors in the US today.
- Helped design / model, plan and lead a team in the development, testing and benchmarking of a highly-available, highly-performant, extensible application event tracking system.
- Helped design, implement and lead a team in developing changes required for the system to ensure zero-downtime during application deploys.
- Introduced a more formal code-review process (and related tools).
- Mentored junior to senior engineers.
- Worked as the release / deployment manager.
- Helped diagnose and promptly address production issues.
- Aided in load / performance testing of the system.
- Involved in cross-team integration architecture and design reviews.
- Paired with and performed many code-reviews for other engineers across the organization.
- Added to on-call rotation (PagerDuty).
- Performed multiple ruby upgrades, updating most, almost all, gems in the process.
- Made significant contributions to the internationalization effort (i18n).
Manager of Development Operations (01/13 - 08/13)
Backupify - Cambridge, MA
The leading provider of backup and recovery solutions for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.
- Made significant strides towards overall system stability, reliability and performance across multiple technolgies (Ruby, Rails, Redis, Resque, Cassandra, Graylog).
- First responder and often coordinator of efforts in addressing critical system failures.
- Stabilitized and enhanced system health monitoring, graphing and alerting.
- Managed technical aspects of our business relationships with Amazon Web Services and others.
- Coordinated and performed multiple zero-downtime upgrades and tweaks to our Redis installations.
- Addressed performance and reliability issues with our implementation of Resque.
- Identified and addressed a long-standing kernel bug related to PostgreSQL and its host locking up.
- Attended DataStax Administrator Training for Apache Cassandra in NYC and received certification.
- Assisted in the upgrade from Cassandra 1.0.7 -> 1.2.5.
- Participated in all aspects of the Scrum process.
- Performed peer code reviews.
Senior Software Engineer [Contract] (06/12 - 08-12)
Blue Cod Technologies - Marlborough, MA
Delivering a broad range of innovative solutions for the unique challenges facing the property and casualty industry.
- Planned & developed a proprietary Document Management / Distribution system (using: ASP.NET MVC 4, Entity-Framework 5, HTML5, jQuery, CSS and SQL-Server 2008 - hosted in Azure)
Senior Software Engineer (03/11 - 01/13)
LeadKarma, LLC. - Cambridge, MA
LeadKarma is a web marketing technology company that applies advanced science to online customer acquisition.
- Coordinated & orchestrated multiple high-visibility enhancements using a variety of technologies across a wide-array of applications / tools (Python, Ruby, Rails, Perl, jQuery, CSS, BASH, MySQL, Memcached, Redis, Pylons and more).
- Performed multiple enhancements to our operational-reporting / data-warehouse system (a bit over 4TB of data last I checked). Changes consisted of: mapping changes, aggressive structurual changes as well as scalability / performance tuning (using: Python & MySQL).
- Performed in-depth analysis of keyword-bidding system (used with: Bing / Google) to uncover algorithms used and make enhancements for more granular control over estimates, clustering and bidding (using: Python).
- Added dimensions / facts to reporting system for identifying: Browser-details, OS-details & Device-details, leveraging 3rd-party database of User-Agent-String details (using: Python).
- Performed peer-code-reviews, held impromptu design discussions / meetings & mentored / trained new engineers.
- Performed Python 2.5 -> 2.7 upgrade.
- Simplied build / deployment process for multiple systems / applications using Chef / Capistrano.
- Performed multiple enhancements to our Production / Reporting UI (using: Pylons / Mako, Python, jQuery, Prototype, CSS).
- Performed numerous Front-End UI Changes (using: Ruby / Rails / CSS / jQuery / Javascript).
- Using Memcached (later Redis) as second-level-cache, developed an "Arrival" look-up mechanism using the IP, user-agent and site-identifier to perform a best guess of identity on un-cookied / un-sessioned site visitors.
- Rebuilt 16x2TB RAID-10 array using our in-house raid-tools, mdadm, plus the {vg,pv,lv} command-line utilities (multiple enhancements were made to our in-house tool during the process).
- Planned and implemented an "off-site backup" solution. This 6TB device goes home every other week, just in case.
Senior Software Engineer (09/10 - 03/11)
Nimbit, Inc. - Framingham, MA
Nimbit aims to provide the easiest solution for self-managed artists, managers, and emerging labels to take their music direct to the fans that love them, and to give fans more ways to support their career.
- Developed a highly-scalable, clusterable Authorization / Media-Ingestion system using Javascript / AJAX / jQuery / PHP for the Uploader component (front-end) and C# / WCF for the server-side component. This system was deployed within Amazon EC2 on Windows Server 2008.
- Quickly ramped up on the code-base and became an effective contributor with-in days. Fixed a significant performance issue with a data-feed for use with the Google Chart API, made many UI / UX enhancements to E-mail Messaging Campaign Management (atop StrongMail) and Message Template management screens within Nimbit's "Dashboard" (Portal).
- Implemented / Integrated new Shopping Cart, Checkout and Receipt page(s) using HTML / CSS / Javascript / AJAX / jQuery.
- Responsible for designing / architecting and prototyping a RESTful Web Service implementation in PHP for use with "New Checkout" and as a public facing API in the future.
- Performed analysis and developed a staged-migration for moving the Nimbit Application-Stack to the Cloud (AWS).
- Proposed and helped implement the "Scrum" process.
Adjunct Instructor (07/09 - 04/10)
The Career Institute of American International College - Framingham, MA
A career college that specializes in healthcare, digital media, personal training and information technology professions.
- Taught multiple modules from the "Enterprise Software Developer Program"
- Planned course-work, decided on resources, lectured and coordinated in-class / take-home assignments
Lead Software Engineer / Architect (08/07 - 09/10)
Blue Cod Technologies - Marlborough, MA
Delivering a broad range of innovative solutions for the unique challenges facing the property and casualty industry.
- Worked as the Lead Developer (for an enterprise team of approximately 20 engineers) responsible for architecting and prototyping the tools and frameworks of the "Enterprise System" consisting of a data modeling tool, a rules engine tool, a core library and server, a software-based load-balancer, a migration / replication library and server, as well as a front-end UI, from the ground up using C#, SQL Server 2008, NHibernate, WCF and Windows Forms.
- Sole developer of the "Rules Engine Tool" (RET) to be used internally (preliminarily), an "Execution Engine / Library,". and a "Load Balancer" (Non-IIS based) capable of distributing transactions across one or more back-end servers.
- Developed the original prototype of the "Data Modeling Tool" the output of which is a set of NHibernate objects, Data Contracts, Assembler objects, WCF Services and SQL files which can be used to create or update the database schema.
- Taught classes on NHibernate, WCF, Multi-Threading, Cross App-Domain Programming, Delegates / Events and Reflection (all of the lectures were taught in a fashion that made them applicable to both Java and C# engineers).
- Proposed and implemented a build / release process (using: Subversion / NAnt).
Senior Software Engineer (02/07 - 08/07)
Enpocket Inc. (later acquired by Nokia) - Boston, MA
Developing Marketing Solutions for Deployment over the SMS / MMS / WAP Channel(s)
- Responsible for adding functionality and maintaining a Request based Marketing Engine / Server known as the "Enpocket Messaging Engine" or "EME".
- Given the opportunity by upper management to prototype a new Web-UI (using: Wicket Framework and Java) outside the scope of daily interations.
Senior Software Engineer (04/06 - 02/07)
Pactolus Communications Software Corporation - Marlborough, MA
Developing feature-rich, carrier-ready IP voice services for converged TDM/IP and VoIP (Voice over IP) networks.
- Responsible for adding functionality and maintaining a highly asynchronous multi-threaded, multi-tiered windows application known as the \"Event Conference Manager\" or \"ECM\" (using: Java and C#).
- Using Eclipse, debugged and analyzed the various middle-tier components making enhancements to code flow, refactoring for readability or adding additional functionality to meet customer requirements.
- Developed a Performance / Smoke Test[ing] Framework.
Senior Software Engineer (04/05 - 04/06)
Dovetail Internet Technologies LLC - Shrewsbury, MA
Developed Real-World Business Solutions / products designed to aid the average user / company in the creation, maintenance, and schedule deployment of Website Content (News, Events, Pictures, Marketing Documents, etc.) in a secure, automated, and completely audited process. (DovetailWRP)
- Sole-Developer responsible for creating an Application (VB6 COM DLL) that would facilitate the Encrypting & Secure Transmission of Web-Form Data by Integrating with VeriSign Email Certificates, an existing Microsoft COM/ADO DLL (Capicom.dll) while working hand-in-hand with "Microsoft Empower" Development Teams to plan, and then code an extensible Software Solution (as a result a Secure E-mail API Framework was added to .NET 3.0).
- Put in charge of the planning the complete rewriting / redesign of a Legacy App, called "DovetailWMS" (6 years in the making - Classic ASP), and transitioning it, using ASP.NET / C# into "DovetailWRP" within 5 months time (this goal was met with time to spare).
Setup Technician (2004-2005)
Whalley Computer Associates - Southwick, MA
Whalley Computer is a full service system integrator with over 150 full-time computer professionals and 28 network engineers located in Southwick, MA and Milford, MA. Whalley Computer services the area's largest corporations.
- Designed, using C# and Microsoft Access, a Windows Forms Based UI used to track and maintain defective / in-repair item inventories easily from anywhere within the WCA Network.
- Responsible for receiving a product, inspecting it for quality, installing any hardware upgrades, imaging the machine, testing it, installing any additional software upgrades / updates, performing a final inspection, then repacking, invoicing and readying the product for world-wide shipment.
Publications & Thought LeadershipBuild Fast, Then Build Right: Lessons From the Trenches of Vibe Coding Techstrong.ai (2025)Exploring the realities of AI-assisted development and why maintainability matters more than ever. Key insight: vibe coding's speed is undeniable, but architecting for AI so outputs don't collapse under their own weight requires discipline, structure, and engineering fundamentals.
From Prototype to Production: How AI Is Transforming Software Development The AI Journal (2025)Examining how AI is reshaping the journey from idea to implementation. Argues that speed alone isn't enough without thoughtful architecture, real engineering discipline, and human oversight. Framework for balancing rapid experimentation with production-grade delivery.
2026 Predictions: Development Culture Shift from Velocity to Veracity DEVOPSdigest (2025)Commentary on the next wave of AI-driven autonomy requiring clearer intent, adaptive architectures, responsibility, and composability at every layer. Predictions on how development culture must evolve as AI systems become more autonomous.
How to Write Nonfunctional Requirements for AI Agents InfoWorld (2025)Addressing new complexity around reliability, transparency, and control in AI-driven systems. Framework for defining standards around safety, explainability, and auditability thoughtfully and practically as agents become more capable.
Additional speaking engagements on AI in eCommerce, The Future of Automation, and Engineering Leadership at Applause, HappyFunCorp, and industry conferences (2019-2026).
Personal / Open-Source Projectsai-tools (2025 - Current)
Local LLM infrastructure and utilities for running AI workloads with llama.cpp (llama-server). Supports multi-model architecture, specialized agent roles (Architect, Implement, Scribe), and both local/server modes. Features automated bootstrap system, Docker Compose for Open WebUI, and optimized configurations for GPU-accelerated inference.
home-dir (2012 - Current)
Cross-platform dot-files and development utilities with bootstrap system supporting CentOS/RedHat, Debian/Ubuntu, OSX, Cygwin & Git Bash. Includes Docker containerization for consistent environments, Vim/Emacs configurations, shell customizations, and 900+ commits of continuous refinement.
homebrew-jzaleski (2022 - Current)
Tap of Homebrew formulae maintained by @jzaleski. Provides curated package formulas for development tools and utilities.
secrets (2025 - Current)
A simple CLI toolset for managing encrypted secrets using GPG. Includes tools for initializing, encrypting, decrypting, and verifying secrets directories with automatic version tracking.
splunk-otel-js-web (2023 - Current)
Simple app to keep track of the time-since an event / activity.
time-since (2023 - Current)
Simple app to keep track of the time-since an event / activity.
docent (2023 - Current)
Modern React, React-Native, FastAPI and Appium demo application.
sidekiq-max-jobs (2020 - Current)
A simple plugin used to control the maximum number of jobs, or maximum runtime, for a Sidekiq worker before terminating.
Appium (2019 - Current)
Mobile App Automation Made Awesome.
list-cli (2019 - Current)
List Management Application (CLI).
python-ostruct (2019 - Current)
OpenStruct for Python.
pymssql (2017 - Current)
DB-API interface to Microsoft SQL Server for Python.
funktoolz (2017 - Current)
Gap bridging function[al] backports for PY2 / PY3 compatibility.
formulaic (2017 - Current)
Simple [declarative] forms for Python.
php-open_struct (2015 - Current)
A very flexible PHP data-structure (inspired by Ruby's `ostruct` library).
better_attrs (2015 - Current)
A gem that enhances `attr_accessor` and `attr_writer` to allow the specification of a callback to be invoked when an attribute value is changed.
resque-retry (2014 - Current)
A gem provides retry, delay and exponential backoff support for Resque jobs.
foundry (2014 - Current)
A gem that aims to keep hierarchical application configuration simple.
purview (2014 - Current)
A gem / framework designed to simplify data warehousing (supports: MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL).
multipluck (2014 - Current)
A gem for Rails (< 4.0) that enhances the `pluck` function to select multiple columns.
attribute_doppelganger (2014 - Current)
A gem that adds convenience methods for defining relationships between attributes.
safe_i18n (2013 - Current)
An `i18n` wrapper gem intended to simplify and expedite internationalization.
resque-concurrent-restriction (2013 - Current)
A plugin for Resque that allows one to specify how many of the given job can run concurrently.
TODO (2012 - Current)
Web-Application & pseudo iPhone / Android Application for storing & retrieving TODOs.
hijack (Multi-User-Dungeon Client) (2011 - Current)
Command-line client built to interface with Simutronics Gemstone IV & Dragonrealms (and more).
MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon Server) (1995 - Current)
Text-based MMORPG-like game, written originally in Q-basic, later in Visual Basic (3.0), Java (1.4), C# (1.14 / 2.0), Java (1.5 / 1.6), C# (3.5), Ruby and currently Python.
Outliner (2006 - 2011)
An online "[Book] Outliner" developed using Javascript / AJAX / jQuery / PHP / Apache and Basic HTTP Authentication.
File Uploader (2011)
The initial prototype of a flash-free Javascript / HTML5 file uploader using Javascript / AJAX / jQuery / PHP.
GSAuctionPlace & TrueWack (2006)
Cross-browser compatible, social networking-esque micro-site(s), written in ASP.NET 2.0.
The Room Online (2005)
Cross-browser compatible, promotional band website, written in Classic ASP.
EducationWestfield State College (now Westfield State University) - Westfield, MA
BA (Liberal Arts), 2004 - Focused in Computer Science, Environmental Science and Math
University of New England - Biddeford, ME
Transferred in 2002 - Laboratory Research and course-work in Marine Biology, Environmental Science and History