Professional 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
Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
Nov 2021 – Present
- 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
Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
Mar 2018 – Nov 2021
- 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
Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
Apr 2017 – Mar 2018
- 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
Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
Aug 2015 – Apr 2017
- 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
Nike, Inc. | Beaverton, OR
- Built company‑wide CA Service Virtualization training and processes, eliminating ~$1M/month in infrastructure spend.
Systems Administrator
Performance Health Technology | Salem, OR
- Maintained the company datacenter (Nutanix Acropolis, Meraki networking, Nagios) and mentored junior administrators and developers.
Helpdesk Manager
Allegheny Technologies Incorporated | Albany, OR
- Supported 2,000+ end users across 5 remote sites; built and deployed systems; mentored technicians and interns.
Armory Chief
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.