Experience
Head of Engineering, Beeper
- Transitioned to Automattic through its acquisition of Beeper; merged and reorganized the also-recently acquired Texts.com team into a standalone Messaging division.
- Re-architected and relaunched Beeper to shift chat network connectivity from centralized cloud infrastructure to direct on-device clients.
- Still spending the majority of my time on architecting, building, coding and debugging.
Co-founder & CTO
- Co-founded a universal messaging platform with Pebble's founder (Eric Migicovsky); selected for Y Combinator S21.
- Scaled a cloud messaging platform to hundreds of thousands of users and tens of millions of bridged messages per day across 12 networks using Kubernetes and Go.
- Built native clients from scratch for iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), and Desktop (React/Electron); hired and led a fully remote 20-person engineering team.
- Built Beeper Mini, a standalone Android app enabling real iMessage via Android phone numbers; grew to 100k paying users in one week and navigated a high-profile technical conflict with Apple, restoring service multiple times before ultimately discontinuing the product.
Senior Engineering Manager
- Joined when Faire had fewer than 100 employees and all engineers reported to the CTO
- After an initial IC period, helped build the early structure for scaling Faire’s engineering team and became its first engineering manager.
- Led teams across retailer growth, first non-US market expansion (Canada), referral program (Faire Direct), and launched online tradeshows (Faire Summer Market) during COVID.
Director, Embedded Software
- Joined Fitbit through the acquisition of Pebble and led integration of the Pebble engineering team, systems, and development practices.
- Led a team of 30 across San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, Romania, and Kitchener building the third-party app platform for Fitbit smartwatches.
- Drove the "Fitbit OS" initiative to ship a shared firmware codebase across multiple products simultaneously.
Firmware Engineering Manager & GM, Canadian Office
- Employee #4 during the original Kickstarter; helped scale to 160+ employees and ship over 1M devices.
- Wrote the original watch OS (FreeRTOS on a 128KB RAM microcontroller) and built the third-party app sandbox.
- Grew to lead the ~20-person firmware team; opened and expanded the Kitchener office to 16 people.
Education
University of Waterloo — BASc, Computer Engineering, 2004 – 2009