// engineering executive · inventor · author · speaker
I build the platforms, safety systems, and engineering cultures behind products people rely on, from scrappy teams shipping fast to companies serving billions.
❯ whoami
VP Engineering @ Roblox, Engineering Acceleration & Core Platforms.
Previously: Director @ Instagram (Trust & Safety) · earlier, Google.
❯ cat focus.txt
"New code is cheap now. Judgment isn't."
I build the platforms, safety systems, and teams that supply both:
infrastructure people stand on, and organizations people grow in.
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I work on the systems that sit beneath the products people depend on: developer infrastructure, service platforms, privacy and safety mechanisms, language systems, and, more recently, the agentic systems that are changing how software itself gets built.
The common thread is not scale for its own sake. The work I keep returning to is the design of systems that help people make better decisions: what to automate, what to measure, what to keep human, and how to preserve trust as software becomes easier to generate and harder to reason about.
And because engineering organizations are made of people, not services, half of this work has always been human. The platforms I am proudest of made thousands of engineers a little braver: safe to ship fast, safe to say "I don't know," safe to do careful work under pressure.
Most of what I have learned about that human half went into Tech Leadership, a field guide for engineers growing into leaders. I wrote it as the book I wished someone had handed me; I have been glad to watch it find its readers.
Four threads run through Roblox, Instagram, and Google: different products, same underlying job, make it safe to move fast, whether that's a scrappy team or a very large org.
The core API and service stack behind roblox.com; developer infrastructure for Google Assistant, YouTube, and Android; compute platforms for ML inference and training. Platforms earn their keep when product teams stop noticing them.
Founded Google's privacy engineering program and served as its engineering voice to US and EU regulators. At Instagram, led Trust & Safety: teen safety defaults, integrity infrastructure, and AI fairness for billions of people.
At Roblox, weaving AI into the everyday lifecycle (review, testing, migrations, observability) with guardrails that encode institutional judgment, so autonomy earns trust the same way engineers do: gradually, with accountability.
Author of Tech Leadership, mentor to directors, engineering managers, and senior ICs. Clarity, trust, and sustainable execution treated with the same rigor as any production system.
Thirty-nine US patent filings, twenty-nine granted, cited more than 1,200 times in later patents and research, across privacy, identity, language inference, browser security, and ranking. Most originated while founding Google's privacy engineering program. Featured below: the most-cited of the granted set, drawings included, because the diagrams still ask good questions.
Talks and writing on agentic engineering, internationalization, privacy, and the craft of technical leadership.
Engineering organizations are hitting a productivity paradox: AI generates more code than ever, yet safe time-to-production has not moved. The bottleneck shifted from writing code to reviewing, validating, and trusting it. This session breaks down the architecture of a prompt-to-production lifecycle: agentic guardrails, self-healing codebases, automated migrations, and the Exemplar Alignment framework that taught AI to reason like senior domain experts.
Session page ↗Tech Leadership: The Blueprint for Evolving from Individual Contributor to Tech Leader, an Amazon #1 bestseller, endorsed by leaders from Google, Meta, and Roblox.
It is the book I wished someone had handed me at Google in 2008: how to grow scope without losing technical curiosity, how to build trust faster than you build process, and how to stay close enough to the work to make careful, useful decisions. I still use its frameworks weekly, mentoring directors, engineering managers, senior ICs, and founders.
If you are an engineer wondering whether leadership has to mean leaving the craft behind, it was written for you. The answer, for what it is worth, is no.
The most useful conversations usually start with a real system, a real team, and a question that is still unsettled. If that sounds like yours, write to me.
[email protected]❯ exit # thanks for reading