Highlights
- 43 years writing code, since age 8. A tenacious problem solver with a passion for code.
- 14 years DevOps & platform: AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, serverless, containers & databases.
- 13 years in financial applications: banking, accounting & payroll, on-chain payments.
- 5 years on blockchain: co-founded ADA Handle; contracts behind 265K+ names.
- 2 years and a current focus on AI agent operations, and open-source agent tooling.
Experience
Kora LabsChief Information Officer2021 – Now
- Co-founded ADA Handle: 265K+ wallet-address NFTs in 70K+ wallets, used by every major Cardano wallet. Wrote its updatable, decentralized minting & editing contracts.
- Led the cost/performance analysis and migrations that cut infrastructure cost 99%, $8K/mo → $80/mo: DB-Sync ($8K) → Ogmios on ECS ($5K) → Lambda with Valkey/Redis and provider APIs ($1.4K) → Cloudflare and self-hosted servers ($80).
- Made chain lookups 38× faster with Maestro, backed by Koios and Blockfrost fallbacks.
- Wrote the smart-contract audits for Handles DeMi and CIP-68 444 minting. Designed HandleComms, decentralized E2E-encrypted messaging (Rust, libp2p, Signal).
- Built K.O.R.A., an autonomous agent that triages tickets, answers alerts, runs deployments and self-repairs the ecosystem when something breaks.
- K.O.R.A. finds and fixes vulnerabilities across every repo, and runs test-coverage sweeps that hold 90% line/branch gates and replace shallow tests.
- Launched H.A.L., a 10K NFT collection minted by chaining 4,000+ transactions faster than blocks settled. Built an open-source chain-scanned API and NFT-ownership OAuth.
Capital OneSenior → Master Platform Engineer2019 – 2022
- Designed a platform streaming 25,000 records/second of ML-generated synthetic data into Kafka, with Fargate autoscaling.
- Monitored and resolved vulnerabilities in containers, images, repos and packages.
- Performed threat analysis and scoring across the team's systems.
XeroSenior Software Engineer & DevOps2013 – 2018
- Shipped across 100+ two-week sprints on SaaS accounting & payroll for 2 million users (C# .NET Core, MVC, REST APIs, jQuery, Durandal, Knockout, Bootstrap).
- Built contextual auto-complete search over 2M+ objects, queried dozens of times a second (AWS Elasticsearch, Node/Express on ECS, Lambda indexing).
- Ran dozens of deployments through TeamCity build chains and CloudFormation.
PixelsilkProduct Management2007 – 2012
- Owned vision, scope, roadmap and releases for a CMS hosting 1,000+ websites of up to 30,000 pages each.
- Ran requirements, UX, quality control, issue tracking, and partner and community relations. Kept development, marketing, sales, partners, key customers, vendors and outsourced teams aligned.
Smart SolutionsSoftware Engineer, Project Manager2002 – 2012
- Managed 200 active customers, 50 active projects and 7 FTEs on projects of up to 4,500 hours (Project Server, Project Web Access).
- Planned an automated QA dashboard tracking error rates, unit, functional, performance and load tests, network resources, releases and uptime.
The Tropical ConnectionIS Manager1999 – 2001
Redesigned a $250K custom ERP covering order entry, tracking, pick/pack/ship and CRM (Visual FoxPro, Pervasive.SQL/Btrieve, VB 5 & 6, Crystal Reports), integrated with FedEx PowerShip, QuickBooks Pro 2001 and Outlook 2000.
Eric M. Watanabe RealtyNetwork Admin, Computer Tech1997 – 1999
Maintained the office network and computers, and trained co-workers to use them.
United States Air ForceAerospace Ground Equipment (A.G.E.)1994 – 1998
Trained in complex avionic and flight-control maintenance systems, continuous quality improvement, periodic maintenance and malfunction identification.