Senior engineering and leadership, applied where it matters.
I work with research, nonprofit, and mission-driven teams — hands-on from architecture through delivery, and equally able to lead the people who do the work.
AI/ML systems & data pipelines
I design and build automated, open-source pipelines for messy real-world data — cleaning, parsing, classification, and NLP — and take them from prototype to production.
That includes LLM-based workflows (I use tools like Claude Code in day-to-day development) and Fast.ai image classification, grounded in three decades of large-scale data engineering.
Scientific & biodiversity informatics
Data modeling, semantic-web / linked-data frameworks, and taxonomic confidence models that connect heterogeneous scientific records into trustworthy, queryable knowledge.
I've grown a biodiversity database to 1.3M taxa and built TraitBank — hundreds of millions of semantic-web triples — at the Encyclopedia of Life, and I bring that depth to your domain.
Open-source platform architecture
Community-driven web platforms built to last — Rails, Django, React, and modern DevOps — with the durability and stewardship that long-lived projects require.
I've founded and sustained platforms used by thousands, and I care as much about the health of a project over a decade as about shipping the next release.
Technical leadership & advising
Fractional engineering leadership, process and team building, and technical partnership on grant-funded work — from proposal and budget through delivery.
I've led globally distributed teams of up to ~65 people and served as PI on $7M in grants, so I can sit on either side of a proposal with you.
How I work
Flexible engagements scoped to what you actually need — a focused build, ongoing technical leadership, or partnership on a grant-funded effort.
Project & build work
A defined deliverable — a pipeline, a platform feature, a prototype — scoped, built, and handed off.
Fractional leadership
Part-time senior engineering leadership for teams that need direction, process, or technical depth.
Advisory & grant partnership
Technical co-design, letters of support, budgets, and delivery for grant-funded research.
Open-source stewardship
Architecture review and long-term maintenance strategy for community-built platforms and archives.
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.