Summary
"Principal engineer with 14 years across infrastructure, DevOps, and platform architecture, now leading applied AI at enterprise scale: local LLM inference (vLLM), agentic and MCP-based systems, governed RAG, and AI cost optimization. Sets direction for model selection, evaluation, and responsible AI consumption while staying hands-on; track record of architecting provider-agnostic platforms and multiplying the teams around them."
Experience
Principal Engineer, Enterprise Systems Engineering
Nov 2021 – Present | Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
- Set enterprise direction for applied AI practices: model selection, retrieval strategy, evaluation and experimentation, MLOps, and responsible AI and model governance for production use.
- Architected a schema-as-guardrails platform that lets citizen developers generate code to company specification safely, enforcing secure tool and data access through approved containers, platforms, and reusable patterns rather than one-off solutions.
- Designed MCP-based developer tooling (a symbol-index server) that reduced code analysis costs by ~70% by feeding models precise, governed context instead of bulk source.
- Maintained and operated internally-hosted LLM inference infrastructure (vLLM) at enterprise scale, serving internal chat and code-generation workloads.
- Built the framework for enterprise Microsoft Copilot adoption, including Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.
- Multiplied teams through architecture reviews, reusable patterns, and mentorship across engineering organizations.
Senior Engineering Manager
Mar 2018 – Nov 2021 | Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
- Led the Release Engineering Core team (6 developers, systems engineers, and architects) and its Agile process; owned the global retail release platform.
- Spearheaded quality efforts for high-demand ("high-heat") sneaker releases; founded an internal engineer training initiative to grow team capability.
Lead DevOps Engineer
Apr 2017 – Mar 2018 | Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
- Architected a containerized, cloud-provider-agnostic global release management platform (Azure, AWS, and datacenter deployments) and handed it off cleanly to the owning team.
- Designed a global package distribution system that cut deployment time from 9 days to 1 hour, removing an infrastructure bottleneck and raising release velocity.
DevOps Engineer
Aug 2015 – Apr 2017 | Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
- Designed a global retail testing methodology (Ansible + Nutanix) that reduced lab creation from 1 week to 1 hour and release testing from two weeks to under one business day.
- Used infrastructure-as-code to guarantee test-environment integrity; helped other teams automate daily work with Ansible and Python.
Service Virtualization Engineer
Jan 2015 – Aug 2015 | Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
- Built company-wide CA Service Virtualization training and processes, eliminating ~$1M/month in infrastructure spend.
Systems Administrator
Mar 2014 – Jan 2015 | Performance Health Technology | Salem, OR
- Maintained the company datacenter (Nutanix Acropolis, Meraki networking, Nagios) and mentored junior administrators and developers.
Helpdesk Manager
Oct 2012 – Mar 2014 | Allegheny Technologies Incorporated | Albany, OR
- Supported 2,000+ end users across 5 remote sites; built and deployed systems; mentored technicians and interns.
Armory Chief
Jan 2009 – Oct 2012 | United States Marine Corps | Jacksonville, NC
- Accountable for $19M in weaponry and electronics; developed and delivered training to 40,000+ Marines; mentored 15 junior Marines into leadership roles.
Skills
Applied AI
Large language models (LLMs)
Agentic and multi-agent systems
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
LLM inference serving (vLLM)
Model evaluation & experimentation
Prompt & guardrail design
Cost optimization & inference efficiency
Responsible AI & model governance
MLOps
Model pretraining
Architecture & Leadership
Enterprise AI architecture
Platform architecture
Build-vs-buy analysis
Technical direction & standards
Mentorship
Cross-functional collaboration
Risk management
Agile
Languages
Python
Bash
PowerShell
Platforms & Infrastructure
Azure
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
Datacenter
Nutanix
Ansible
Jenkins
Git/BitBucket
CI/CD
Infrastructure-as-Code