2023 — Now
San Francisco, California, United States
For the first ~9 months, I worked on a mix of engineering, design, and product problems to stand up the first version of the product, which allowed our developers and users to build agents, review conversations, and report issues. I also worked on one of our first agents. I helped build the product from a few design partners to many paying customers (we've publicly shared reaching $100M in ARR in Nov 2025).
Since then, I have focused on our Insights features. Among other things, I:
Worked with some truly excellent data platform engineers to migrate reports and other in-product features to use Clickhouse. We optimized the schema and query patterns to keep these features fast for even our largest customers (millions of conversations per month).
Improved, then ultimately deleted, various caching systems as a stop-gap before Clickhouse shipped.
Built SierraQL, a Clickhouse-inspired portable query language for customer conversations, providing a portable way to query conversations across our reporting and internal MCP tooling.
Improved our Monitors feature, which continually evaluates the performance of our agents. Customers can track the quality of their agents with built-in and custom monitors.
Helped ship our Agent Observability feature, which is a combination of business and operational alerting on top of our in-product agent analytics.
2021 — 2023
✨
Experiments, adventures, contracting
2021 — 2023
San Francisco, California, United States
I spent some time in the mountains, backpacking sections of the Pacific Crest Trail and the Sierra High Route.
I also explored a few different software product ideas that I've had over the years. The two I worked on the most are Composer (https://vbud.dev/blog/composer) and Cairn (I haven't written about this yet).
I also worked through a series of difficult knee problems (ACL tear + cartilage damage from surgical error, 4 surgeries in total), requiring lots of consultations with various expert surgeons and physical therapists. Ultimately, I had to pursue cartilage restoration surgery in Sep 2023, and I'm still working through rehabbing this complex situation.
For ~9 months, I helped Anrok (https://anrok.com/) with design, product, and engineering for the first version of their product.
For 3 months I contracted at Metronome.
2019 — 2021
San Francisco
I built a capable design team from scratch given my experience working on observability products at New Relic. Designing for observability is hard, so I worked closely with the heads of product and engineering to change how we worked so that design could better participate in our various projects, and I worked with recruiting to identify profiles of designers that would be effective working on a technical product like Lightstep.
I also started Lightstep's UI component library and design system, in collaboration with a designer on my team.
2019 — 2019
San Francisco
2018 — 2019
San Francisco
Completed an initiative to migrate Remix's Transit UI from Leaflet to MapboxGL. Remix is a complex drawing tool built on top of a map, so performance was a large focus. I optimized both React and MapboxGL performance as part of this effort.
I also worked on two new features for Remix's Transit planning product: 1) search 2) v2 of Remix's Jane isochrone.
Education
2010 — 2012
Uppsala University
Masters
2010 — 2012
2005 — 2010
University of Nevada, Reno
Bachelor of Engineering - BE
2005 — 2010