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 thrive on greenfield work: taking ambiguous, high-level ideas and rapidly prototyping them into shipped products and foundational platforms. 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
- Knowledge Layer for Agentic Tax: Conceived and leading a greenfield platform that converts tax forms, instruction booklets, and publications into structured markdown, then extracts business rules, pseudo-code, and rich metadata linked back to source PDF sections. The output is the foundational dataset powering Intuit's agentic tax products, enriching data models and downstream artifacts with traceable links into source documents.
- GenAI PDF Comparison: Took an ambiguous idea — "compare two tax form versions and identify meaningful tax changes so that downstream system changes can be automated" — from blank page to working product. Defined what comparison and evaluation mean for multi-page PDFs with complex layouts and tables spanning pages, and designed the architecture and evaluation framework underpinning a GenAI tool that helps tax experts assess legislative changes.
- Automated Test-Case Document Comparison: Prototyping an LLM-based application that ingests unstructured test-case documents from the Canada Revenue Agency, converts them into a structured representation, and automatically detects changes between documents — surfaced through a visual representation that significantly reduces manual analysis work performed by Tax Analysts.
- TurboTax Canada Testing Strategy: Assessed the full TurboTax Canada technology stack and processes, identified critical testing gaps, and defined a series of target states capturing a long-term vision. From those target states, shaped a set of initiatives forming a roadmap that achieves the vision iteratively while hitting clear business outcomes along the way. Partnering with multiple teams to execute on this roadmap, and built tooling to manage tax-return test data as part of it — projected to save a minimum of 150 human-days of manual effort, translating to significant cost savings for the company.
- 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.
- Coaching and Mentorship: Mentoring staff and senior engineers on technical leadership, career progression, and promotion readiness, fostering both organizational and individual growth.
- 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