Fifteen years across engineering, product, operations and leadership. Currently a Software Engineer at Bravo, working across multiple countries.
I’ve moved between engineering and leadership for most of that time — not because I couldn’t decide which one I was, but because I kept finding the same problem from both sides: teams that had the skill to deliver but not the conditions to do it well.
Four or five times across my career I saw work the organization needed that nobody owned, started doing it without the title or the pay to match, and then made the case — with evidence, not persuasion — for the role to formally exist. That’s how I ended up running engineering career paths, hiring systems, and eventually a whole company.
Two tracks in parallel, deliberately: engineering from junior through staff-level architecture, and organizational systems — career-path design, hiring methodology, COO. The engineering depth is what makes the people decisions precise. The people depth is what makes the engineering decisions strategic. Today that’s full-stack work with an architectural bias, and multi-agent AI workflows in a production SDLC — all of it in the method.
The decision I get asked about
I joined that company in 2010 as an engineer. In 2018 I became its COO — around seventy people, two dozen clients. A year later, leadership asked me to start treating people as cost lines instead of the reason the numbers were working. I said no.
Saying no meant leaving. Not a different seat at the same table — leaving, after nine years of learning there, getting things wrong there, and getting to define roles, processes and ways of working that stayed after I was gone. It meant leaving friends, and a place that had stopped feeling like a job a long time earlier.
It was a hard thing. It was also the right one, and I’ve never revised that. Care and trust aren’t the soft part of the job — they’re the mechanism, and I’d just spent six months measuring it (what happened).
I went back to hands-on engineering somewhere else first, and to the same company later, in a different seat. Leaving on principle didn’t have to mean leaving for good.
What I actually do, day to day
Most days there’s no ticket telling me what to do. I go find the team member who’s stuck, the PR that needs a second pair of eyes, the product idea that hasn’t been scoped yet, the other team that needs an integration assessed. I own work from definition to production, and I run the same review-and-help cycle for whoever’s next to me doing theirs. That’s not extra effort — it’s the actual job, whatever the title on the org chart says.
Where I am now
I left Dealerware on April 30, 2026, after three years, when the company restructured and moved to cut non-US roles — I was offered a contractor arrangement but we didn’t reach terms. I’m currently at Bravo.
On mistakes
I extend the same rule to myself that I extend to a team: a mistake is data, not an identity. Move on, adjust, keep going.