Solution architect and CTO turning technically complex ideas into systems that ship and endure. I focus on reducing uncertainty, pressure-testing the assumptions that carry the most risk, and making the architecture decisions that are expensive to reverse—with deep experience in fintech, payments, and blockchain. I've worked from early-stage startups to governments and financial institutions, usually in heavily regulated or emerging environments where the rules are often evolving in real time.
Core Capabilities
- System Architecture & Technical Strategy
- Technical Due Diligence & Risk Reduction
- Product & Engineering Alignment
- Platform Modernization & Migration
- Fintech, Payments & Digital Assets
- Engineering Organization Design & Scaling
Technical Environment
Architecture: Distributed Systems · API Design · Cloud-Native Systems · Identity · Payments Infrastructure · Event-Driven Systems
Infrastructure: AWS · Terraform · Linux · CI/CD · Networking · Observability
Languages: Python · TypeScript · Node.js · SQL · Bash
Philosophy
Technology is a tool for creating clarity, leverage, and better decisions.
The most important work is often not building the solution itself, but identifying the assumptions that introduce the greatest risk and finding the fastest way to validate them. Strong teams focus on learning, prioritization, and execution before scale.
Whether building products, organizations, or technical systems, long-term success comes from aligning incentives, simplifying complexity, and removing everything that does not meaningfully contribute to the outcome.
Selected Experience
Partner with founders, executives, and engineering teams to reduce technical uncertainty through architecture, technical due diligence, infrastructure planning, and engineering leadership across fintech, payments, retail technology, and emerging platforms.
Most engagements begin with ambiguity: an evolving product, inherited systems, architectural uncertainty, or technical decisions that are expensive to reverse. My role is to identify the assumptions carrying the greatest risk, validate them early, and design systems that support long-term business goals.
Selected Engagements
Building a consumer payments platform required banking partners, payment processors, compliance, and issuer relationships to align before a production platform existed.
- Designed the core payments architecture around real payment-network constraints rather than isolated software components.
- Validated assumptions directly with banking partners, Mastercard, and payment processors before committing to implementation.
- Built web and iOS prototypes supporting investor diligence and reducing implementation risk.
A retail operation ran on a tangled mix of autonomous-store AI, legacy POS, e-commerce, delivery, and inventory systems, with the original SaaS vendor disappearing and no clear picture of how the pieces fit together.
- Reverse-engineered the platform to map its critical operational dependencies before changing anything, then rebuilt only the minimum infrastructure required to keep the business running.
- Migrated key workflows to Toast and Shopify while preserving day-to-day operations throughout the transition.
- Reduced operational cost and improved maintainability by replacing the parts that mattered rather than rebuilding wholesale.
An early-stage company needed to become a functioning engineering organization and ship a production platform while building investor confidence.
- Built the initial engineering team and led development of the first production platform.
- Established lightweight delivery practices—enough structure to ship without the heavyweight process that slows an early-stage company.
- Supported fundraising through technical leadership and direction.
A traditional construction company had to meet enterprise security and compliance requirements for Southern California Edison without disrupting operations.
- Treated compliance as an operational design problem rather than an IT checklist—standardizing identity, security, device management, and documentation before expanding the footprint.
- Implemented Microsoft 365, Intune, and Entra ID with the security controls and documentation needed to support audits.
- Built infrastructure that reduced day-to-day friction while positioning the business for future growth.
King Tide was growing rapidly across multiple client engagements, requiring consistent discovery, architecture, and delivery practices that could scale alongside the engineering organization.
- Scaled engineering from 2 to more than 30 across Los Angeles and Mexico City.
- Established repeatable discovery, architecture review, and delivery frameworks.
- Led architecture and product strategy while mentoring engineering leaders and remaining hands-on with technical decisions.
Organizations exploring blockchain often struggled to separate practical implementation from industry hype.
- Built one of the leading enterprise blockchain education organizations.
- Designed Ethereum-based digital credentialing integrated with Pearson VUE, issuing 1,000+ certifications before NFTs reached the mainstream.
- Worked with governments, enterprises, and financial institutions evaluating distributed systems.
Equity crowdfunding was still emerging, with product, regulatory, and technical requirements evolving simultaneously. The platform also needed to scale rapidly while supporting unpredictable traffic from high-profile campaigns and preparing for institutional investment.
- Built engineering from effectively zero through Seed and Series A.
- Introduced AWS autoscaling and MongoDB to support rapid growth.
- Built and led a distributed engineering organization.
- Helped evolve the platform into one supporting equity fundraising across multiple jurisdictions.