About
Staff engineer in Nampa, Idaho. I've spent 20+ years writing code — from a city-government IT internship in 2004, through Amazon customer support, then nuclear power, global semiconductor manufacturing, multi-family rental tech, and most recently Meta.
The throughline: I tend to find work where new technology has to coexist with deeply entrenched legacy systems, and I'm useful in the seam between them. Lately that means LLM-powered products on top of decades of accumulated business data.
Now
Software engineer at Meta since June 2025 — remote from Idaho.
Open source
- PMC Member & Contributor, Apache NiFi — started by adding features I needed at Micron that didn't exist yet (better database support, paging, the MS SQL CDC processor) and stuck around long enough to land on the PMC.
- Contributor, Apache Airflow — small but pointed contributions around data traceability, monitoring, and bug fixes that came out of running Airflow at production scale.
- Personal projects on the projects page — currently a lot of Rust (MCTS library, temporal-graph pattern matching, abstract-argumentation frameworks) plus a Python audiobook tool that's somehow my most-starred repo.
Background
- Meta — Software Engineer (Jun 2025 – present). Remote.
- Apartment List — 4 years across two roles in multi-family rental tech.
- Staff AI Engineer (Aug 2023 – Jun 2025). Lead backend developer on Sunny.com — a renter-facing LLM chat interface that collects preferences, scores properties, and has an actual conversation about what someone is looking for in a home.
- Staff Data Engineer (Jul 2021 – Aug 2023). Introduced dbt to the company; led the rollout alongside Airflow to rebuild the core data warehouse on BigQuery using a One Big Table architecture.
- Micron Technology — 9+ years across four roles in global semiconductor manufacturing.
- Senior Solution Architect (Jun 2018 – Jul 2021). Apache NiFi PMC work; built an ETL automation platform that spun up new globally-distributed pipelines in minutes.
- Sr Data Science Integration Engineer (Apr 2017 – May 2018), based in Singapore. 3PL logistics integrations (package locations, SLAs, OTD, forecasting) and a Neo4j commonality report for backend semi manufacturing.
- Big Data Software Engineer (Feb 2015 – Apr 2017). Hive, Spark, Teradata pipelines; graph work in Neo4j and GraphX; custom NiFi processor development.
- Software Engineer (Apr 2012 – Feb 2015). ASP.NET / C# / WinForms apps, Maximo customizations via custom Java MBOs, SAP PM/QM integration via RFC web service calls.
- Energy Northwest — Application Systems Analyst II (2009 – 2012). Nuclear power utility — large-scale document migration into SharePoint, custom EDMS adapter for corrective-report intake, VB6 → ASP.NET migrations.
- Amazon.com — Digital support (Aug 2007 – May 2008). Customer support for Amazon MP3, Unbox, and the original Kindle launch era.
- City of Kennewick — IS Intern (Jun 2004 – Sep 2006). Where it started.
Stack
Comfortable in Python, TypeScript, Java, C#, Scala, Rust. Day-to-day I reach for Python and TypeScript; for personal projects I lean hard on Rust. On the data side: BigQuery, Airflow, dbt, Spark, NiFi. On the AI side: OpenAI, AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs, plus a self-hosted Home Assistant + LLM tooling stack on a homelab box at home.
Mentorship
Mentoring is something I've come to genuinely value — both giving and receiving. The most influential teacher in my own life lately has been my Japanese tutor: a 70-something retired computer engineer who 3D-prints his own mailbox sensors and is still learning new things. I wrote about him here.
Open to occasional advisory or mentoring conversations — get in touch if you think I can help.
Education & certifications
- M.S. Computer Science (Data Science emphasis, incomplete) — Boise State University, 2015–2016
- B.S. Information Technology (Software Development) — Western Governors University, 2011–2012
- Google Cloud — Professional Data Engineer
- Google Cloud — Associate Cloud Engineer (expired)
Outside work
I run a homelab that powers most of my house — Home Assistant, ET-driven irrigation automation, self-hosted LLM tooling, the works. I'm slowly learning Japanese with Anki. I have a wife and four kids who are extremely patient with all of the above.