About
I'm a fractional CTO for non-technical founders. I work with companies that have a product to build and nobody senior on the technical side, and I make the architecture, hiring, vendor and AI decisions with them until they are ready for a full-time technical leader.
I spent five years at LinkedIn, ending as a Senior Software Engineer on search and recommendations for LinkedIn News and Sales Navigator, and I'm an inventor on a US patent for AI-driven recommendations. As founding engineer at Architect Health, I took a healthcare platform to production through SOC 2 and HIPAA, and built an LLM service that matches digital health products against health-plan criteria, with a person reviewing the uncertain matches. I also co-founded Lucitra.
That mix is the point. I have seen how large engineering organizations make decisions, and I have built from zero as the founding engineer at an early-stage company. I studied marketing at the University of Texas at Austin before moving into engineering, and hold a master's in software engineering from Harvard Extension School, so I am as comfortable talking about customers and margins as about databases. Originally from Houston, now based in Austin.
How I Work
- Stay close to the work. I talk with the people who do the job before deciding what to build. Strategy gets sharper when it is tied to the actual workflow.
- Explain it plainly. A founder should understand every technical decision well enough to defend it to an investor. If I cannot explain it simply, it is not ready.
- Use AI where it earns its place. I build agents and LLM features when they pay for themselves. When a rule, a report or a process change would do better, I say so.
- Reliability is part of the product. Tested releases, audit trails, and a person approving anything that sends, pays or deletes. Trust is built in, not added later.
- Leave the company stronger. You keep the code, the accounts and documentation your team can follow. A good engagement ends with you needing me less.
Outside of Work
- Animal rescue and adoption advocate
- Strength training and outdoor running enthusiast
- Sports fan. Rockets, Astros, Texans, Texas Longhorns.
- Currently playing Whiteout Survival