Profile
Strategic leader with 15+ years of experience transforming complex business systems at firms like The Knot Worldwide and Cisco. Proven record of driving bottom-line results through operational excellence, process optimization, and hands-on technical leadership. Diverse background spanning network engineering, system administration, running a business, database administration and software engineering, and yes, AI. Nothing is impossible.
Core Achievements
- Turnaround Management: Rescued a failing fulfillment system, achieving 100% accuracy and guaranteeing delivery.
- Process Improvement: Increased team efficiency and output by 40% year-over-year through Agile implementation and team building. Happy engineers do better work.
- Team Building: Fostered a culture of collaboration and high performance to solve ambiguous, high-stakes business problems with grace and elegance. Speak truth to power.
Technical Skills
Leadership & Strategy
Strategic Thinking, Operational Excellence, Agile PM, Engineer Mentorship
Languages
Node.js, JavaScript, PHP, Go, SQL, Rust (some)
Systems & Tools
MongoDB, Postgres, Linux, Jira, Git, AWS, Agile, HTML, CSS, tortoise-tts, AI/ML Integration (RAG)
Professional Experience
Software Engineer Manager
The Knot Worldwide
April 2020 — November 2025
Washington, DC
- Operations Turnaround: Led the full-scale transformation and re-architecture of a critical, failing fulfillment system, achieving 100% order accuracy and guaranteed delivery.
- Process Excellence: Implemented a new Agile/Jira framework that increased team efficiency and output by 40% YOY.
- Strategic Engineering: Guided engineers in retiring legacy systems ("tech debt") and deploying scalable, resilient enterprise solutions.
- Business Intelligence & AI: Pioneered the use of AI tools to analyze proprietary data, enhancing operational monitoring and ensuring immediate, real-time awareness of customer-impacting issues.
Senior Software Engineer
Cisco
Dec 2014 — April 2020
Gaithersburg, Maryland
- Core Revenue Systems: Architected and delivered the mission-critical fulfillment system supporting multi-million dollar business telephone contracts.
- Operational Integrity: Designed and implemented a high-availability "integrity service" that verified 100% of contracted services for over 50,000 business customers.
- Internal Tooling: Developed custom tools empowering the operations team to manage ordering/fulfillment systems, significantly reducing engineering dependencies.
Software Engineer
NIC USA Vermont
June 2012 — Dec 2014
Montpelier, Vermont
- Created custom web applications for state of Vermont government agencies using PHP, Drupal, and Symfony.
- Facilitated communication between state officials and engineers, translating technical requirements into actionable development tasks.
- Maintained and enhanced existing applications, ensuring high availability and performance for public-facing services.
Owner
NaplesRentals.com
1997 — 2017
Gaithersburg, Maryland
- This was one of my billion dollar ideas. I was building AirBnb years before anyone heard about AirBnb. I needed a business partner, but I never found one, and I was 25 years old.
- Built online business entirely by myself in my bedroom. I made good money running the website for 20 years, but eventually, I couldn't put the time into it. AirBnb and VRBO had won.
- I was the engineer, the designer, the sales rep, customer support, accounting and billing.
Owner
Vance Consulting, LLC
2003 — 2005
Seattle, Washington
- Built web applications for businesses.
- Built Verizon employee survey application. Results provided to the CEO.
- Sales, project management, client management, programming, design and implementation.
Technologist
HouseValues.com
Vigilos
Bazillion
n-Link
Pinnacle Realty Management
InfiNetwork
ICUSA
1996 - 2012
Varies
- I started my tech career in 1996 providing tech support for a dial-up ISP in Naples, Florida.
- I did everything from building out networks, managing the IT for an entire company
- I bounced around during the dot-com boom in Seattle, one company went IPO - HouseValues.com
- This skills variety supports me even today. I'm more than just a software engineer. And I'm not just a tech leader. I can get deep into the work building software, setting servers and load balancers ... whatever it takes to get it done.
Interests
- Leveraging AI (RAG models) for creative analysis and persona-based chatbots.
- Developing collaborative music composition application using Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and Lily Pond.
Education
University of Washington - Seattle
Bachelor in Journalism (2006-2008)
GPA: 3.5