Summary
VP of Technology with 15+ years turning domain problems into technology that works for the people who depend on it: federal research and museum deployments, Fortune 500 consulting delivery, and cloud-native infrastructure for regulated higher-ed institutions. Currently leads a $10M+ TCO technology organization and a 25+ person distributed team, including a 20-person offshore build, serving 100+ institutions. Strongest where non-technical vision meets the systems that make it real.
Experience
HCE, private-equity-backed analytics firm serving 100+ higher-ed institutions · Chicago, IL
- Led full cloud migration from on-premise to AWS; eliminated $200K annual CapEx, cut operational overhead to $4K/month, and reduced critical process latency 80% (2 hours to 10 minutes).
- Designed and shipped a layered data platform (Bronze/Silver/Serving) on AWS Glue/PySpark, Step Functions, and Redshift Serverless; metadata-driven pipeline design eliminated brittle per-client transformations across 100+ institutional clients.
- Architected two B2B SaaS products, including a multi-tenant Net Price Calculator on AWS microservices (.NET 8, ECS Fargate, React), with all institution logic driven from database configuration and built for DOE/FERPA compliance.
- Built and directed a 25+ person distributed engineering organization, including a 20-person offshore team in India, against a $10M+ TCO including vendor contracts and platform licensing.
Second Story (Razorfish Emerging Experiences / Publicis Groupe) · San Francisco, CA
- Architected and operated the AWS backend for T-Mobile's Times Square New Year's Eve platform: 100,000+ concurrent sessions, 10,000+ images/hour, 100% uptime with zero display incidents.
- Architected Razorshop, a proximity-aware IoT retail platform (BLE, MQTT, AWS IoT, Adobe Experience Manager); the platform contributed to Publicis Groupe winning Adobe Digital Marketing Partner of the Year in 2015 and 2016.
- Designed SFO Terminal 3 "Flight Deck," a three-tier real-time platform connecting large-scale projection, six multi-touch kiosks, and a mobile layer; won 1st Place Creative Innovations Award (2014 Peggy G. Hereford Award).
HCRC (Human Capital Research Corporation, later HCE) · Chicago, IL
- Built full-stack web applications, Tableau dashboards on custom SQL views, and automated data acquisition for institutional research analysts.
- Designed and prototyped the organization's first data warehouse, the direct precursor to the cloud-native ETL platform later built as VP of Technology.
Earlier experience: Graduate Research Assistant / Funded Researcher (Argonne), UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (2009–2011): invented TacTile, a multi-touch research platform replicated by the Science Museum of Minnesota for exhibit use. Undergraduate Research Assistant, UIC EVL (2008–2009).
Core Competencies
Engineering Leadership: Team scaling (onshore/offshore), $10M+ TCO ownership, executive and board communication, vendor/MSP management, Agile/Scrum
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, Glue, S3, Step Functions, Redshift, CDK, KMS, WAF), Terraform, Docker, CI/CD (blue/green, canary), HA/DR
Data & Architecture: ETL/ELT, layered data platforms (Bronze/Silver/Serving), PySpark, microservices, event-driven systems, multi-tenant SaaS, infrastructure as code
Security & Compliance: ISO 27001, SOC 2, DOE/FERPA, PII-free data architecture, KMS encryption, OWASP
Languages: Python, C#/.NET, C++, JavaScript/React, SQL
Education
M.S., Computer Science
University of Illinois at Chicago · Electronic Visualization Laboratory, Argonne research
2011
B.S., Computer Science
University of Illinois at Chicago
2009