About
Technologist. Databases by training, search and knowledge systems by practice. What I do best: bring clarity to ambiguous, complex situations — connecting what’s technically possible with what a business will actually pay for.
The career-long pattern: hands-on technical lead of small, senior teams — typically 15–25 engineers — owning architecture, design, and correctness, from Bell Labs through Kosmix, Zettata, and Aerospike. The larger organizations (Google Search Ads ~180 engineers, Aerospike engineering ~100) were the exception, not the mode.
Some evidence for the pattern: topic-based web search over 10B+ URLs at Kosmix, where I personally owned answer quality for a million queries a day. A continuously learning commerce search engine at Zettata, acquired by Target. Most recently at Aerospike: co-led the design of distributed ACID transactions and personally drove the correctness argument, wrote the LARK paper (log-free linearizable replication, arXiv 2025) including its formal proof of correctness, and personally built a working prototype evolving a 15-year-old storage engine toward shared object storage — driving LLM coding agents end to end.
Three startups, all acquired. A decade of research before any of it — 5,000+ citations, 14 U.S. patents — and it still shapes how I think.
Currently between things, which means I have time for good conversations — catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, and talking about interesting problems.