Engineering Manager · Director of Engineering
I bring structure and delivery predictability to engineering teams in messy, fast-growing, or high-stakes regulated environments — without drowning them in bureaucracy.
I'm the leader you bring in when delivery is slipping, planning is guesswork, and the org has outgrown its process — and you want that fixed without burying the team in bureaucracy. I make delivery legible to executives, give engineers room to do their best work, and keep engineering aligned with product and the business.
When I took over my current org, the team was routinely over-committing — promising far more than it could realistically deliver. Estimation discipline and metric-driven planning shortened delivery cycles and made our forecasts honest again.
Metric-driven, low-bureaucracy, high-accountability. I add the structure a growing org needs — estimation, prioritization cadence, clear ownership — without the process bloat that slows good engineers down.
I've grown teams substantially while standing up their first hiring pipeline, onboarding, and developer-competency framework. I invest in people and their growth, not just headcount.
My background is military leadership before software — five years leading ground-security operations where the cost of error was measured in lives, not tickets. That's where I learned to own outcomes in high-consequence environments, build risk-driven plans, and stay calm when things are messy.
I give people real ownership, make it safe to raise the hard thing, and let the best idea win regardless of who it comes from. I serve as the primary engineering liaison to executive leadership — translating delivery status, technical risk, and staffing into decisions the business can act on.
I also bring modern tooling into the SDLC deliberately: agentic AI in code review and development, Playwright end-to-end automation, and a competency framework that holds AI-generated code to the same review rigor as a colleague's. New leverage, same standards.
A sample of what I've designed and shipped — the proof behind the leadership.
A production multi-tenant SaaS for trading-card retailers: photo-based card identification, daily market pricing, automated trade-in quoting, inventory tracking, and point-of-sale sync. I helped architect the platform, the CI/CD pipeline, and an agent-based development workflow.
An autonomous "engineering team" that turns a one-line brief into a near-complete application. A Director agent orchestrates eight specialized sub-agents through a six-phase pipeline — research, architecture, implementation, review, testing, delivery — encoding an org chart and SDLC in code.
A multiplayer voxel survival game built with an authoritative client/server split from day one: server-authoritative simulation, client-side prediction reconciled against server snapshots, a headless dedicated server, and transport-swappable networking behind clean architecture seams.
A local-first, gamified self-improvement app: quests grant XP to skills, skills level up, rewards unlock at milestones, with streaks and a 28-day activity heatmap. A clean modern mobile stack with schema-driven migrations and documented product decisions.
A commercial demo built around a declarative reasoning engine grounded in Answer Set Programming — the logic-programming family that includes Prolog. An industrial equipment configurator reasons over regulatory and emissions-compliance rules to flag issues automatically, paired with an interactive, browser-based playground I packaged and deployed.
A digital-binder web app for a trading-card game I designed: animated booster-pack openings, a collection browser, a duplicate-to-dust economy, decks, and an admin panel — backed by a real relational schema and weighted rarity rolls.
A multi-page website for a missions non-profit, taken end to end: live Stripe donation checkout, a golf-tournament registration flow, newsletter and contact handling, and a custom brand and layout — deployed and handling real money.
A complete used-car dealership site: a public inventory and vehicle browser plus a password-protected admin area for adding, editing, and importing vehicles with photo uploads. Built and deployed end to end.
Plus an interactive engineering-competency matrix I designed to level, evaluate, and grow my team.
Lead a large engineering organization — 20+ contributors across multiple teams, including an engineering manager who reports to me — running one of the company's flagship product lines, used across much of the country. Grew the team significantly and brought faster, more predictable delivery.
Promoted to EM within my first year and ultimately led multiple engineering teams. Introduced Agile/Scrum across engineering and product and drove a major year-over-year improvement in delivery speed. Stack: Ruby on Rails, React, SQL.
Defense-client engineering in a secure, compliance-driven environment.
Five years leading ground-security operations — physical security, patrols, intelligence-driven planning — safeguarding high-value assets and personnel. Where I learned to own outcomes in high-consequence environments.
I'm exploring Director of Engineering and senior Engineering Manager roles — strongest in small-to-mid SaaS, PE-backed companies, and govtech, defense, or other regulated domains that need structure and leadership depth. Omaha-based, open to remote.