Building the best commerce ecosystem possible for Entrepreneurs and Merchants of all shapes and sizes. Helping to foster an engineering culture of imagination and action. Learning everything I can about majestic monoliths, distributed systems, and data processing at planetary scales.

As the leader of the Technology organization I was responsible for organizing and directing the Engineering, Corporate IT, and Video and Audio Production teams. Through a journey of 15 years I helped grow the company from a collection of sports blogs operated by a few folks in a basement into the leading independent media company it is today.

Built Chorus, the core Ruby on Rails based publishing, community and revenue platform that secured Series A funding for Vox Media and powered its subsequent growth.

Scaled the platform from tens of thousands of visitors a month, to tens of thousands of visitors a minute.

Evolved the platform as the company evolved, adding muti-brand-and-newsroom-tenancy, advertising and marketing campaign planning and execution tools, multi-stage editorial publishing workflows, and robust community moderation and engagement features.

Built or directed the development of a dozen or more other products, tools and services in a wide variety of languages, data services and deployment targets.

Some highlights include Syllabus, a RoR Live Blogging CMS; Sauron and Conan The Deployer, a Golang and Node/Express based “pre-kubernetes” Docker container orchestration and deployment system; Duet Magic Super Proxy, a Rust based “content stitching” proxy deployed to Fastly’s C@E platform.

Managed infrastructure growth from 3 ad-hoc on-premise servers to hundreds of instances across multiple cloud providers. Executed multiple zero-downtime data center build-outs and migrations. Operated hybrid infrastructure with on-premise and multi-cloud footprints. Led the transition to IaC and containerized infrastructure on AWS and GCP. Key partner to CFO delivering real-time operating budget and data informed budget estimates.

Established Site Reliability Engineering practice. Introduced and professionalized Configuration Management, Automated Testing and Deployment processes. Directed responses to business threatening DDOS attacks and other malicious activity. Suffered zero security or data loss incidents during 15 years of massive growth and change.

Scaled Corporate IT infrastructure from a couple of wifi access points purchased at Best Buy and a manually configured Postfix server to to a robust and highly automated corporate network and IT operation utilizing SD-WAN services, VMWare based virtualized on-premise and cloud infrastructure, Active Directory, JAMF, Okta, Google Workspace and automation tooling. Delivered secure, performant, business critical productivity tools to thousands of staff and contractors spanning multiple regional offices and remote locations.

Leveraged this strategic investment in virtualization, automation and a culture of service to transition the entire span of Vox Media business operations, including Audio and Video Studio Productions, to be fully remote in response to global pandemic with minimal impact to the business.

Built the Corporate IT and Application Security program. Key partner to the General Counsel and Legal team in matters of GDPR/CCPA, data privacy and compliance requirements. Responsible for the success of security and compliance audits related to M&A activities, investment rounds and strategic partnerships.