About
I came to software from manufacturing
01Background
Why the manufacturing years are the useful part
I trained as a chemical engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then spent the first stretch of my career in manufacturing rather than on the path a chemical engineering degree usually points at. At Eno-Chem, which I founded, I designed a heterogeneous exhaust catalyst manufacturing process and took production from roughly 500 to 3,000 cubic feet a year. At EE Systems I designed gas compression packages, relocated a catalyst production facility, and, notably for what I do now, built the accounting integrations that cut down the month-end close.
That is also where I first ran into the spreadsheet problem from the operating side rather than the software side. When a process runs on a workbook, whoever maintains it quietly becomes a single point of failure, and everyone else builds workarounds for the parts that are wrong.
I moved into software at S&P Global Platts, completing the technical integration of an acquisition and replacing legacy front-ends for commodity data products. Then eight years at FlightAware, starting as a developer and finishing as VP Engineering. Along the way FlightAware was acquired by Collins Aerospace, and I led my organization through that integration while protecting the product velocity that made it worth acquiring.
Today I am also founder and CTO of Cloudline, where my co-founder and I are building an AI-native platform for general aviation maintenance. GoYugen is the consulting and custom software side of my work, and it is where the industrial client engagement lives.
The reason I lead with that rather than with the engineering degree: most of the businesses GoYugen works with are the size where nobody does only one job. I have been on that side of it. I have run a production operation, I have read my share of P&IDs designing compression packages, and I have been the person building the integration that made month-end close bearable. So when someone walks me through what their quoting or costing process actually has to account for, and why the obvious simplification would break it, that is a familiar conversation rather than a new one.
02Track record
Selected work
- 01
FlightAware, AeroAPI
Grew a product line from about $850K to over $4M a year
I championed moving FlightAware's AeroAPI onto Apigee, against a strongly build-in-house culture. The platform shift improved monetization reliability and developer experience and let us expand the product incrementally instead of in big risky releases.
- 02
FlightAware, Firehose
Rewrote a business-critical streaming product in under six months
Firehose, FlightAware's real-time streaming data product, was a bespoke Tcl application that could not meet the performance targets customers needed. I proved that with measurement rather than argument, then led the rewrite to C++ and delivered it in under six months. I then took on the containerization and CI/CD work nobody had asked for, which turned a fragile release process into reliable anytime deployments.
- 03
Collins Aerospace
Turned around a delivery organization that was losing its launch customer
I took over a product organization that was shipping roughly three to four features per quarter, with launch-customer confidence going. Working across teams in the UK and India, we got to more than twenty per quarter and rebuilt the relationship.
- 04
FlightAware and Collins Aerospace
Led roughly 120 people through an acquisition
As VP Engineering I owned execution across commercial APIs, streaming data, historical replay, customer-facing services, internal platforms, and weather aggregation, sustaining more than 25 percent annual growth on the API and data products. I built the leadership practices across about sixteen teams in the US, UK, and India: onboarding, promotion, mentorship, manager development, and remote hiring.
03Consulting
Available for a limited amount of consulting work
Separately from the applications GoYugen builds, I take on a small number of advisory engagements. These tend to be situations where someone needs a senior technical read on something consequential, and needs it to be honest rather than comfortable.
Fractional CTO and engineering leadership
Technical leadership for a company that needs the judgment but not yet the full-time salary.
Engineering turnarounds
Delivery has stalled, trust with the business or a customer is eroding, and the team knows it. I have taken an organization through exactly that and out the other side.
Platform and API strategy
Whether to build or buy the platform layer, how to monetize an API properly, and how to make a data product something developers actually adopt.
Architecture and reliability review
An outside read on a system before you commit to scaling it, or after it has started hurting.
Applied AI, in development and in products
Where AI genuinely earns its place in a development workflow or a product, and where it is being adopted because it is fashionable. I work with these tools daily and I am direct about their limits.
Technical due diligence
Assessing what you are actually acquiring: the codebase, the team, the operational reality, and the cost of the things nobody mentioned.
04Applied AI
Non-deterministic systems in places that cannot tolerate surprises
The work I am most interested in at the moment is what has to be built around a model to make its output safe to depend on. At Cloudline that means reading aircraft maintenance logbooks, where an entry saying an airworthiness directive was complied with is a legal record and a plausible wrong answer is an airworthiness problem.
The pattern that came out of it generalizes well past aviation, and healthcare is asking the same question now. Rather than compress it into a paragraph here, it has its own page.
05Depth
What I work in
Listed plainly rather than as a logo wall. These are things I have shipped and operated in production, not things I have read about.
Languages
- Go, TypeScript, Python, C++, SQL
Web
- React, Next.js, Postgres, REST and streaming APIs
Infrastructure
- AWS, CDK, ECS and Fargate, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway, Kinesis, S3, Docker, CI/CD
Applied AI
- AI-assisted development workflows, and building model-backed features into production applications with explicit boundaries on what data they touch
Leadership
- Engineering strategy, org design, turnaround leadership, post-acquisition integration, hiring and promotion systems
Outside of work I am a commercial pilot, rated for single and multi-engine airplanes and instrument flight. It is a large part of why aviation is where I have spent the last decade of my career.
If any of that is useful to you
Whether it is an application to build or a technical problem you want an outside read on, the way to start is to tell me what is going on.