Career, Roles & Skills
Roles, education, skills, and the decisions and outcomes that connect them.
Professional roles
Founder
Exit Zero Labs
The company my independent software ships under, founded February 2026 and bootstrapped: three products, one release pipeline, one person.
Present
Software Engineer II
Microsoft
Four years on the surfaces that configure a Teams meeting, ending up leading customization for Facilitator, the AI agent that sits in one.
Present
Software Engineer
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
Two years building hardware-in-the-loop and full-simulation software for the F-35 and F-16, and automating the tests that clear an aircraft for its mission.
Football Team Photographer
Penn State Football
A semester photographing the team, the sideline, and the crowd, and learning to make decisions at the speed the moment actually moves.
Software Engineering Intern
UPS
A summer with the Revenue Allocation IT team, building supply chain tooling so business users could map allocation rules for large accruals themselves.
IT Help Desk Technician
Penn State IT Help Desk
A semester as the person students, faculty, and staff came to when something had stopped working.
Software Engineering Intern
Synchronoss Technologies
My first software job: debugging JSP for performance and seeing an entire product path from concept to release for the first time.
Programs and foundations
Skills
AI systems
- Prompt engineeringPrompts are versioned files in the repository, reviewed like code.
- LLM orchestrationComposing multi-step generation into durable, resumable pipelines where each step can fail on its own.
- Evaluation-driven developmentRubrics and gates decide whether generated output advances. A demo that went well is not evidence.
- Retrieval and RAGAnswers are grounded in approved retrieved evidence, and a claim without evidence is not made.
- Agentic developmentDevelopment runs close to fully agent-driven, with the standards checked into the repository.
- AI cost controlBounded generation allowances enforced in the code path, so a retry loop cannot become a billing incident.
Interfaces
- ReactProduction surfaces used at Microsoft scale, including moving one onto a data-generated architecture.
- AstroServer-rendered pages with hydration limited to the clusters that genuinely need it.
- AccessibilityWCAG 2.2 AA as a build constraint, with motion, contrast, and type preferences applied before first paint.
Languages
- TypeScriptPrimary language for the last several years, in strict mode with contracts parsed at every boundary.
- Swift and SwiftUITwo shipped iOS apps, one on Core Data and one on SwiftData, both native and offline.
- RustThe backend of a Tauri desktop application: schema validation, file handling, and encrypted key storage.
- C# and .NETBackend services behind a Teams scheduling surface, and supply chain tooling on ASP.NET before that.
Platform
- Cloudflare WorkersThree deployed Workers joined by service bindings, with no public HTTP between them.
- Durable ObjectsOne SQLite object per conversation, with resumable streaming across dropped connections.
- D1 and SQLiteAuthoritative structured content, forward-only migrations, and full-text search as a derived index.
- R2 and media deliveryImmutable processed derivatives, served privately. No untouched originals are retained.
- Cloudflare WorkflowsDurable multi-step execution: a run resumes at the step that failed.
- Postgres and PrismaRelational modelling behind a subscription product, with row-level access rules.
Practice
- API designVersioned routes, cursor pagination, idempotent creates, optimistic concurrency, and one error envelope.
- Security and privacyClient-side encryption with no server-readable plaintext, and interfaces that decline to collect what they do not need.
- Testing and automationAutomated test environments for aircraft simulation, and deterministic browser regressions for product work.
- PerformanceOptimising React surfaces that load inside every meeting, where the budget is someone else's page.
- Technical leadershipLeading a product surface across AI scientists, prompt engineers, architects, designers, and product management.
- Cross-team collaborationMoving live configuration features into another team's live product without regressions.
- PhotographyA semester shooting a college football team, and an ongoing practice of editing hard and publishing little.