About Me
- Expert Software Development Leadership: Excels at optimizing developer productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, enabling engineers to deliver exceptional customer value. Guided by a deep understanding of developer needs and a shared passion for well-crafted code and superior tools.
- High-Performing Team Builder: Recognized for ability to cultivate and retain highly skilled technical talent, consistently delivers outstanding ROI.
- Thrives in Complexity: Frequently sought after to provide solutions to intricate software engineering problems, including those involving AI and scale.
- Effective Communicator: Seamlessly engages with senior executives, business leaders, partners, customers, engineers, and academics.
- Principled Leadership: Guided by a strong commitment to leaving a positive and lasting impact on organizations.
Work Experience
Crusoe.ai - San Francisco, CA
Senior Director of Engineering
Dec 2024 - Present
Leading change at a climate aligned AI startup.Note: The dates on these roles at Google overlap because I did many of them simultaneously.
Google Inc - Sunnyvale, CA - Core Machine Learning, Technical Infrastructure
Director of Engineering
May 2021 - Nov 2024
Core ML creates foundational infrastructure, services and code frameworks that power machine learning across all Google products. Built and led a team of 40 engineers. Contributed to TensorFlow, Jax, XLA, eval systems, high scale release infrastructure, and making it easy for Google engineers to integrate ML into products. Launched the first Google-wide LLM based developer solution that automates required code review steps. Worked closely with Google Deep Mind and other research teams to deliver critical infrastructure to all Gemini model developers and users at Google. Examples: blogpostGoogle Inc - Sunnyvale, CA - Vertex AI, Google Cloud Platform
Director of Engineering
Aug 2023 - Nov 2024
Vertex AI offers everything you need to build and use generative AI—from AI solutions, to Search and Conversation, to 130+ foundation models, to a unified AI platform. Led a team of 20 engineers to automate and safeguard model releases at scale (LLM, Foundational, Gemini). Pioneered evaluation technologies that became standards across Google model development.Google Inc - Sunnyvale, CA - Core Data Infrastructure
Director of Engineering
Jul 2019 - Jun 2023
Core Data’s mission is to unlock the power of Google’s data – by enabling product teams to build the next generation of data driven innovations for end-users. The Core Data product suite offers end-to-end data management solutions, infrastructure, and foundations for Google products operating at planet-scale, including flagship products such as Search, Ads, YouTube, and Geo. Immersed in some of the most Google parts of Google (Search backend and logs collection), led multiple initiatives to address code health, technical debt, and overall engineering excellence, resulting in a significant improvement in the quality, maintainability, and efficiency of the codebase.Google Inc - Sunnyvale, CA - Google-wide Code Health, Configuration and Reliability
Director of Engineering
Oct 2012 - Jun 2023
Created and led a dedicated team responsible for developing innovative tools tailored for internal software developers. At the core of these tools was the provision of timely and relevant information, a crucial element in enhancing workflow efficiency and aiding in effective decision making. Impact was substantial and spanned numerous years - touching nearly every single engineer at Google, eliminating entire classes of outages and enabling Google’s code base to scale. Elevated the importance of configuration at Google by treating it on par with source code: rigorous testing, validation, analysis and integration with developer surfaces. My efforts contributed to a more robust and scalable software development environment, fostering collaboration and ensuring the delivery of high-quality software. Examples:Google Inc - Mountain View, CA - Google Shopping
Director of Engineering
May 2012 - Jul 2019
Delivered organic and ads experiences, consumer and partner facing, for example: Shopping Ads (PLA), Google Shopping, Shopping organic shopping units in Search, and Merchant Center. Stakeholder management, innovative productivity solutions, leadership.Google Inc - Mountain View, CA - Google Analytics
Senior Engineering Manager
Sep 2015 - Mar 2017
Innovated around legacy code base, one of the largest data stores in existence, strategic product infrastructure turnaround, hiring and staffing.Google Inc - Mountain View, CA - Adwords, Advertiser Platform
Senior Engineering Manager
Apr 2011 - Jun 2014
Solved long standing developer velocity problems slowing down AdWords UI innovation. Matrix organization, distributed leadership, team building.Microsoft Corporation - Bellevue, WA - Microsoft Advertising
Principal Test Manager
June 2009 - March 2011
ML operations, reliability, live site troubleshooting, developer focused innovation, team building.Microsoft Corporation - Redmond, WA - SQL Server
Principal Test Manager
May 2000 - June 2009
XMLQuery, XML storage/retrieval, XML Schema, Query Processing, Query Optimization, SQL, File Systems, Customer engagement.Microsoft Corporation - Redmond, WA - Exchange Server
SDET, SDET Lead, Test Manager
Jan 1998 - May 2000
MCIS, Internet Protocols, Exchange Server 5.5 & 2000.Sponsored Publications
Technical teams should challenge limits and drive innovation. I motivate my engineers to assume leadership roles by sharing their work in publications. I was the executive sponsor of the following publications:
- Productive Coverage: Improving the Actionability of Code Coverage (ICSE - SEIP 2024.)
- MuRS: Mutant Ranking and Suppression using Identifier Templates (ESEC/FSE 2023.)
- Please fix this mutant: How do developers resolve mutants surfaced during code review? (ICSE - SEIP 2023.)
- Practical Mutation Testing at Scale: A view from Google (IEEE TSE 2021.)
- Automatically Generating Machine Learning Models for Software Tools That Operate on Source Code (Us Pat. No. 11,150,877 B2)
- Does mutation testing improve testing practices? (ICSE 2021.)
- Long Term Effects of Mutation Testing (ICSE 2021.)
- Identification of Low-value Code to Improve Efficiency of Automated Code Analysis (TD Commons)
- Techniques For Easy and Efficient Manipulations of Large Codebases (TD Commons)
- Code coverage at Google (ESEC/FSE 2019.)
- State of Mutation Testing at Google (ICSE - SEIP 2018.)
- An Industrial Application of Mutation Testing: Lessons, Challenges, and Research Directions (ICSTW - Mutation 2018.)
- Process for displaying test coverage data during code reviews (US Pat. No. 9,405,662)
Skills
- 10x Thinking
- Adaptability and Flexibility
- Artificial Intelligence
- Building Teams
- Collaboration
- Commercial Acumen
- Communication
- Customer Advocacy
- Decision Making
- Developer Tools
- Emotional Intelligence
- Feedback & Coaching
- Infrastructure
- Interpreting Data and Metrics
- Machine Learning
- Mentoring
- People Management
- Problem Solving
- Project Management
- Reliability
- Risk Management
- Scalable Leadership
- Software Architecture
- Software Development
- Software Engineering
- SQL
- Stakeholder Management
- Systems Thinking
- Talent Development
- Technical Knowledge
- Technical Vision and Strategy
Community
- Frequent mentor and career coach
- Executive sponsor for emerging leaders for Google-wide goal to increase representation in leadership.
- Actively improved DEI by personally matching late stage under-represented candidates to hiring managers with open roles
Education
- MS in Computer Science, Missouri University of Science and Technology, 1997
- BS in Geology and Geophysics, Missouri University of Science and Technology, 1995