Senior software engineering leadership for work that matters.
Three decades building large-scale data systems, AI/ML, and open-source scientific infrastructure — now helping research, nonprofit, and mission-driven teams design, build, and ship the systems they depend on.
What I do
Hands-on senior engineering and leadership — equally comfortable architecting a system, writing the code, or building and steering the team that does.
AI/ML systems & data pipelines
Automated, open-source pipelines for messy real-world data — cleaning, parsing, classification, and NLP — including LLM- and Fast.ai-based workflows from prototype to production.
Scientific & biodiversity informatics
Data modeling, semantic-web/linked data, and taxonomic frameworks that connect heterogeneous scientific records into trustworthy, queryable knowledge.
Open-source platform architecture
Community-driven web platforms built to last — Rails, Django, React, and modern DevOps — with the durability and stewardship long-lived projects require.
Technical leadership & advising
Fractional engineering leadership, process and team building, and technical partnership on grant-funded work — from proposal and budget to delivery.
Selected work
A few projects that show the range — from rare-fungi conservation to feature films.
Leading organizational strategy and grant development for this rare-fungi conservation nonprofit. Exploring how to apply my experience in software development and AI data pipelines to fungal conservation.
One of the largest community-driven platforms for fungal observation and identification. Built a Fast.ai image classifier on its dataset and integrated LLM tools (ChatGPT, Claude Code) into ongoing development.
Led the technical team at the Marine Biological Laboratory; grew the database 4× to 1.3M taxa, created TraitBank (hundreds of millions of semantic triples), and served as PI on $7M in grants (MacArthur, Sloan, NSF).
Modernized the studio from proprietary to commodity + open-source infrastructure (~10× performance, ~$100M saved), scaled production 1→3 films/year, and earned credits on 13 films.
Let's build something durable.
Available for consulting and fractional technical leadership; rates on request. Much of my paid work is for nonprofit, grant-funded, and mission-driven organizations — and separately, I donate time outright to a few projects each year.