I'm a dual-hat PM/Designer embedded within the U.S. Space Force working on DevEx and cloud-native tools.

I led a platform engineering team that modernized legacy micro services used by missile defense apps. My team integrated these services, which had been on-prem and airgapped, with a high-security AWS-based cloud platform, harnessing k8s standards such as Helm charts, and creating a fully modern CLI / TUI (terminal user interface) using Cobra and Bubble Tea. With each on-prem setup costing ~$1M per contractor plus ~$500K in recurring annual costs, our cloud-based solution positioned the Space Force to scale up savings across America's entire missile defense program.

I’ve published articles about design, engineering, and AI in UX Magazine, ADP List, Computer World AU, Entwickler.de, Built to Adapt, and UX Bootcamp. I’m a member of UX Magazine's top author community.

Between freelance gigs and writing, I design and build apps that explore new territory using LLMs, gesture recognition, speech interfaces, and data visualization (luminousfloatinghead.com).

As lead designer for Flexport’s data platform, I established a lean, agile approach to identifying, scoping and executing design work. This entailed working in compact sprints that fostered collaboration with research, product management and engineering.

I led design for the integration of ML automation into ocean shipping schedules. I designed a process for operations teams to manually override problematic schedules (think of a pilot turning off autopilot in bad weather). The design integrated sending reports on poorly generated schedules to Flexport’s data science team, creating a virtuous feedback loop. We reduced manual ML overrides from 8% to 2%.

As a design lead at Pivotal, I guided interdisciplinary teams through large, open-ended problems in the cloud computing space. I led research, facilitated interdisciplinary ideation, and crafted user experiences through rapid prototyping.

I led design for several products and feature sets from concept through customer adoption. One product, Pivotal HealthWatch, gained 100 percent traction with the 30+ Fortune-500 customers we tracked.

In addition to my design responsibilities, I led hiring for Pivotal's nascent R&D design team in EMEA. I worked closely with recruiters to find candidates who might thrive in a complex, technical domain. I recruited, interviewed and onboarded two principal-level designers.

Note: Pivotal was acquired by VMWare in 2020.

At Practice Fusion, a healthcare startup backed by Peter Thiel, I designed and built data visualizations as a part of the medical informatics team. I later moved to R&D where I drove new product ideas and designs.