About

I'm an engineering manager and machine learning engineer with a focus on NLP and ML systems design, building high-trust teams, and strong software engineering practices.

In practical terms: I build systems that do things with ML that ML is actually good at, and I also build and tend the human systems that make it go.

I lead the engineering team at Hidden Door, where we're building a platform—and working with authors and other IP holders—to let players return to the worlds they love via interactive narrative games.

Evergreen interests (I'll talk about this any time!)
  • Using the right ML tools in the right places
  • Finding the ayyy lmao in startup engineering
  • Managing remote engineering teams
  • Testing & type-checking in Python
Newer interests (What's on my mind lately?)
  • Observability
  • Figuring out the front end and the eldritch horrors of Javascript (in service of the above)
  • Structured LLM evals

Some things I've done

I've used classical machine learning to solve problems of classification and prediction (including time-series data and NLP), implemented testing and type-checking in large and untested codebases, spun up your typical AI engineering prompting/testing/evaluation setups, and worked with LLMs for practical non-chatbot applications.

I'm known for clearly communicating this work and collaborating with teammates who have a wide range of backgrounds and scope concerns, from engineers to execs to cross-functional peers in marketing, product, and design.

I've also fixed or helped fix some very tricky sociotechnical challenges.

Before my engineering career, I did a PhD in evolutionary biology at Harvard, where I studied why horses evolved one toe.