About Me
Principal Engineer with 20 years of experience helping organizations turn ambitious business goals into executable roadmaps and high-impact software. I specialize in software architecture, microservices, and technical leadership — designing systems from scratch and establishing architecture practices that drive sustainable growth. I bring expertise in cloud platforms and GenAI, and a track record of building high-performing teams across startups, mid-size, and enterprise environments.
Experience
- Development Acceleration: Assessed the TurboTax Canada development landscape, defined and executed an architectural roadmap that reduced development timelines by 50%, significantly increasing delivery velocity.
- GenAI PDF Comparison: Architecting and leading the development of a GenAI-powered solution to analyze PDF tax forms, enabling tax experts to efficiently evaluate legislative changes.
- Coaching and Mentorship: Mentoring staff and senior engineers on technical leadership, career progression, and promotion readiness, fostering both organizational and individual growth.
- AI-Powered Tax Research: Designed and delivered a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solution for tax artifacts, empowering experts to query forms, instructions, and brochures, accelerating research and decision-making.
- Architecture Reviews: Reviewing and contributing to all architectural RFCs at homebase
- React Native Architecture: Leading the architecture and implementation of approach and implementation of a micro-frontend framework for mobile apps in React Native
- Monolith Decomposition: Actively pairing with engineers in various teams to refactor the monolithic service to domain oriented services.
- Mentorship: Mentoring of senior engineers and staff.
- Personalization Platform: Designed and implemented a service enabling audience-based recommendations for web and mobile clients, empowering product and marketing teams to deliver personalized content and significantly improve user engagement.
- Reference Architecture: Led the creation of a hexagonal architecture reference implementation in Python, establishing the organizational standard for microservices. This initiative streamlined development practices, fostered a shared architectural language, and laid the foundation for improved domain modeling.
- Domain-Driven Design: Directed the re-architecture of core platform components to evolve towards domain-oriented microservices, increasing modularity and scalability.
- Architecture Advisory Forum: Founded and chaired a cross-team forum to drive architectural decision-making, resulting in more consistent, efficient, and effective engineering outcomes.
- Technology Radar: Introduced and integrated a Technology Radar to guide technology adoption, aligning engineering choices with business objectives and ensuring proactive evolution of the tech stack.
- Engineering Principles: Authored and published a set of engineering principles that provided clear guidance across teams, raising code quality and development consistency.
Tech Stack
Python
Google Cloud
JavaScript
- Scalable Data Validation: Designed and delivered a serverless data validation service that validated large CSV files against JSON Schema. Reduced validation time from days of manual effort to near-instantaneous results, while providing detailed reporting that improved reliability and accelerated data workflows.
- Schema Management Service: Built a standalone system for creating and managing JSON Schemas, standardizing customer data formats and enabling efficient versioning and integration with the validation service.
- Data Ingestion Pipeline: Developed a centralized ingestion service to consolidate and monitor data feeds from multiple public sources into the Greenplum database, improving visibility and consistency across datasets.
- Architectural Leadership: Served as a core member of the architecture group, reviewing and shaping critical design decisions to ensure alignment with strategic objectives and best practices.
- Team Leadership: Recruited, led, and mentored a team of 6 data/software engineers while providing oversight to 10 additional data engineers, fostering collaboration and technical excellence.
Tech Stack
Python
Greenplum Database
AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, SQS)
- Engineering Practice Foundations: Established the core team structure and architectural foundations for the RBC Loyalty and Rewards platform, setting the stage for long-term scalability and innovation.
- Cross-Platform Leadership: Directed engineering efforts across web, Android, and iOS teams for www.rbcrewards.com and companion mobile applications, driving alignment and informed decision-making.
- Solution Architecture: Guided solution design and architectural decisions that enabled the successful launch of the RBC Rewards website and mobile applications.
- Configuration Driven App Development: Addressed the challenge of accelerating mobile app development by architecting a configuration-driven approach for dynamically rendering mobile apps at runtime. Developed a comprehensive schema encompassing all app aspects, including components, data sources, UI, and navigation.
- SaaS Platform Development: Led the architecture and development of a domain-oriented SaaS platform for the above app builder, contributing significantly to the company's revenue. My role encompassed backend architecture, technology stack selection, and hands-on development of both backend and frontend components.
Tech Stack
AWS Services (API Gateway, S3, Cognito, Lambda, SQS, SNS, Elastic Beanstalk)
Elasticsearch
TypeScript
React.js
Node.js
- Innovative UI Framework Development: Pioneered the development of a highly dynamic and customizable JavaScript-based UI framework for the creation of new UI modules for Kloudville's e-commerce platform.
- Development and Architecture: Acted as a key member of the team developing a distributed application to manage and monitor a storage cluster
Tech Stack
Python
Twisted Matrix
JavaScript
Dojo Framework
- Remote Android Device Viewer: Designed and developed a remote/browser-based Android device viewer. This solution allowed remote access and viewing of Android devices, enabling efficient troubleshooting, and debugging of a printer screen that was being developed by the company.
- Phone Application Team: Member of the BlackBerry Phone Application team, contributing to the development and enhancement of critical phone-related features.
- Feature Development: Contributed to the development of features such as call logs, smart dialing, dialing experience user interface and 3rd party integration middle-ware
- Mobile Video Surveillance Application: Successfully developed a sophisticated mobile video surveillance application that enabled real-time video streaming to mobile devices.
- Mobile Game Porting: Ported source code to multiple platforms, including J2ME and BlackBerry.
- Patent: Call note management on communication device, Patent #20110086627
Tech Stack
.Net Framework
J2ME (Java)
Windows Phone
BlackBerry