Staff Software Engineer

Architecture, authorization, and durable systems under real-world constraints

I design and deliver systems that have to remain understandable while they evolve. My work spans the full lifecycle: turning ambiguous requirements into technical models, building across product and platform surfaces, migrating production safely, operating what ships, and raising the engineering quality bar around it.

Areas of focus

Authorization systems

Fine-grained and context-aware access control, policy modeling, request-and-approval lifecycles, and Cedar-based evaluation.

Platform architecture

Modular systems, domain boundaries, event-driven coordination, relational data modeling, and backward-compatible evolution.

Developer platforms

Multi-language SDK and Terraform generation, API versioning, static analysis, CI, test infrastructure, and operational tooling.

Technical leadership

Requirements refinement, architecture documents, cross-functional delivery planning, migrations, mentoring, incident response, and internal training.

Experience

2022–Present StrongDM Access and authorization platform · Acquired by Delinea

Staff Software Engineer

Post-acquisition platform integration

Help lead the integration of StrongDM's proxy and core access architecture into Delinea's microservice platform. Selectively preserve and adapt the highest-value product IP while moving from an AWS, Go, and PostgreSQL monolith to an Azure stack built on RabbitMQ, SQL Server, and Cosmos DB, aligning architecture and delivery across newly combined teams.

Cross-functional delivery

Lead authorization initiatives with cross-functional partners, turning ambiguous requirements into reviewed technical models and carrying them through sequenced delivery and safe rollout.

Access lifecycle ownership

Own the access-request and ephemeral approval domain end to end, from policy design through production operation.

Fine-grained access control

Designed and implemented delegated administrative access control that scopes permissions by resource context without granting full administration. Defined policy-safe state transitions and carried the model through every product surface and a backward-compatible migration path.

Unified authorization

Designed and implemented a context-aware authorization model that unifies standing, requestable, and time-bound access at a single policy decision point. Established canonical modeling and deterministic projections so intent remains consistent across every user and automation surface.

Production migration

Led a backward-compatible migration separating hierarchical group membership from role assignment without disrupting existing behavior or customer configurations.

Protocol observability

Designed a terminal protocol parser that reconstructs interactive commands across SSH and Kubernetes streams for structured query logging.

API evolution

Evolved SDK and Terraform code generation for versioned APIs while preserving stable client ergonomics and backward compatibility.

Integrations & operations

Delivered reliable incident-response integrations. Share on-call ownership of the production system.

AI enablement

Facilitated week-long AI engineering bootcamps focused on techniques developed and documented by StrongDM. Helped teammates apply those techniques effectively in day-to-day engineering work.

Build and maintain F#kYeah, an open-source implementation of the public Attractor specification.

Apply Semport within an Attractor flow to maintain the C# port of the Cedar authorization language from its Go upstream, preserving behavior against the upstream conformance suite and documenting the engineering lessons from that work.

2010–2022 Applied Underwriters Financial services technology

Software Development Team Leader II

Solution architecture

Translated complex business and regulatory requirements into maintainable software, data models, and operational processes across thick-client, service, and REST API systems.

System modernization

Introduced domain-driven design, CQRS, functional techniques, and explicit architectural boundaries while modernizing long-lived applications under significant compatibility constraints.

Team building

Built and led two development teams, mentored future team leaders, and rewrote the department training program around object-oriented design, SOLID, GRASP, refactoring, and testability.

Data & delivery operations

Designed relational schemas and queries, administered production SQL systems, coordinated high-availability migrations, and owned source-control, build, release, and audit workflows.

Selected engineering work

cedar-dotnet

An idiomatic C# implementation of the Cedar policy language and authorization engine, maintained against the upstream implementation and validated with its 124,000-case official conformance corpus. Benchmark-driven evaluator work made authorization up to 12 times faster while preserving that behavioral contract.

Mixology for Go + .NET

Parallel Go and C# reference applications that make modular boundaries and cross-cutting concerns executable across seven bounded contexts and independent CLI, TUI, and desktop clients. The semantic port preserves observable behavior while rebuilding persistence, hosting, presentation, and concurrency around idiomatic .NET.

arch-lint + enumstruct

Production-ready analyzers for architectural boundaries and exhaustive generated unions. Both use the go/analysis framework and integrate with established golangci-lint and go vet workflows.

Teaching and communication

AI engineering enablement

Facilitator for internal AI engineering bootcamps focused on specification-driven development and durable agent workflows.

Technical writing and presentations

Write and present implementation-backed explanations of authorization, application architecture, testing, distributed algorithms, and mathematical software, ranging from cross-surface application design and RIBLT set reconciliation to a ground-up tour of ECDSA.

Programming education

Created more than 60 tutorials on neural networks, machine learning, and regular expressions, reaching more than 830,000 views and 5,000 subscribers.

Mathematics instruction

Former Cal Poly teaching associate for calculus, trigonometry, and algebra.

Education

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Master of Science, Mathematics
Bachelor of Science, Mathematics

Peer-reviewed research

Published in Linear Algebra and its Applications.

Mathematical modeling

Meritorious designation in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling while representing Cal Poly.

Technology

Go · C# · F# · PSQL · MSSQL · Cedar · GraphQL · gRPC and Protocol Buffers · Terraform · Kubernetes · domain-driven design · static analysis · API and SDK design · CI/CD · production operations

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