Summary
- YC W'21 founder of Chorus Sleep; built and led the technology org from zero to acquisition by Sleep Reset (2026).
- 20 years in industry, 14 leading engineering — hiring, mentoring, and growing managers and senior/principal talent.
- Grew Chorus to 100k+ paid users across 26 countries, with 80% month-1 / 50–60% month-6 retention, and measurable clinical gains (30% faster sleep onset, 20% better daytime functioning).
- Architected and built Luna, a multi-layered, memory-informed agentic AI sleep coach with novel prompt + eval pipelines that reason safely over health and behavior data to deliver personalized, multi-step interventions.
- Transformed engineering, product, and operations into AI-first orgs — agentic coding, extensive automation, and rigorous evals in place of hand-written code and manual processes.
- True full-stack technical depth (devops, backend, web, native mobile, ML) and a founder's relentless drive to learn and solve the hardest problems.
Experience
Co-Founder and CTO
- Co-Founded and led Chorus Sleep (YC W'21) from zero to acquisition by Sleep Reset (May 2026). Backed by Y Combinator, Precursor Ventures, and Goat Capital.
- Grew Chorus to 100k+ paid users across 26 countries, with 80% month-1 / 50–60% month-6 cohort retention, and clinically meaningful outcomes — 30% faster sleep onset, 30% fewer awakenings, 20% better daytime functioning.
- Architected and built Luna, a memory-informed agentic AI sleep coach — real-time conversational reasoning, novel prompt + eval pipelines that operate safely over personal health and behavior data, and personalized, multi-step interventions tuned to each user.
- Transformed engineering, product, and operations into AI-first orgs starting in late 2022 — agentic coding (~90% AI-written code under rigorous evals), agent-driven content + ops workflows, and automation replacing hand-written code and manual processes; created ~5 FTEs of equivalent capacity on a lean team.
- Shipped at AI-leveraged startup velocity — full platform internationalization across mobile, web, and content library in 6 weeks (12 languages) for a major B2B partner; near-fully-automated audio, written, and image content pipelines.
- Product-obsessed, customer-first — weekly mom-test style calls with users, deep analytics + A/B experimentation, and white-glove B2B onboarding designed to scale without ballooning team workload.
- Co-led B2B sales and the full M&A process through acquisition. Comfortable across the table from C-suites, boards, investors, and high-net-worth individuals; ran dozens of such conversations with calm, professional partnership.
- Operated as a true business co-owner — co-led capital planning, P&L, fundraising, vendor/partner contracts, and the cross-functional decisions (HR, legal, ops) typically out-of-scope for leaders at larger companies.
- Built and led engineering from zero — hired, mentored, and leveled up engineers across backend (Go, Postgres), native mobile (Swift, Flutter, React Native), web, and ML; personally architect and scale the end-to-end cloud-native platform.
Director of Engineering
- Led an engineering team across backend, frontend, product/eng leads, and QA for an online publication serving millions of monthly customers — hired and developed engineers across all levels; team described by the COO as "the most effective engineering team I've ever seen."
- Owned and architected the AWS-to-Google-Cloud re-platform (Go, Postgres, App Engine) — eliminated entire classes of infra complexity, cut hosting cost by over 50%, and unlocked materially faster product iteration.
- Rebuilt the core CMS backend from PHP/Laravel to Go, used daily by hundreds of editorial staff — ~90% hosting cost reduction, eliminated all lost-work scenarios, and replaced a 12+ hour, nightly, fully-static publish pipeline with delta-based, CDN-backed publishes under strict verification.
- Led design and build of a novel multi-retailer shopping app with same-day, automated courier delivery — full transactional backend (users, carts, orders, messaging), ingestion of hundreds of thousands of product webpages daily, and single-checkout integrations across retailers.
- Deep cross-functional partner across product, editorial, social, D2C, marketing, HR/ops, data science, and exec leadership — drove the affiliate program rebuild using ML product classification and personalization, content syndication to Google/Apple News, third-party platform integrations, and supported the company's sale and asset transition to Dotdash.
Director of Engineering / Founding Engineer
- Co-architected the API services, security infrastructure, and engineering roadmap from day one at a fintech startup building frictionless in-store and online checkout — Go, AWS, Postgres; the underlying technology generated multiple US patents for the company.
- Built, mentored, and led engineering team across backend, iOS, Android, frontend, ops, and contractors.
- Partnered with the CEO on enterprise sales, translating complex technical material for executive audiences and helping negotiate and close Toyota Financial and other strategic accounts.
Director of Engineering
- Owned and led "The Great Migration" — ported 3+ billion records of core site data from a ~15-year-old Oracle/Java platform onto Google Cloud; affected and enhanced service for ~300M+ registered users, millions of invitations per year — the de facto digital invitation platform of the era.
- Promoted 3 times across 4.5 years from software engineer to Director of Engineering — co-led entire engineering org; hired, mentored, and grew engineers across frontend, backend, DevOps, and QA; ran performance reviews, retention, technical growth, and leadership training and opportunity.
- Designed and built REST APIs, internal tools, and data pipelines serving five+ client applications across web, native mobile, and partner integrations — high-volume, on-prem infrastructure handling heavy event/holiday traffic spikes.
- Operated and scaled core on-prem distributed systems — an SRE-like role spanning MySQL clusters, Memcached, NoSQL stores, heavy background task/queue processing, and personally built zero-downtime deployment, provisioning, and traffic-splitting tooling.
Software Engineer
- Built backend services and webapps in C++, Python, and Perl for a large-scale, pre-cloud MMO virtual world (There.com, VirtualMTV) — thousands of on-prem Linux servers (~300 per cluster).
- Foundational experience in large distributed systems, production Linux ops, and large MySQL clusters — all self-managed infrastructure with no cloud services to fall back on.
- Shipped into 20+ live production releases against a 7M+ line codebase — learned disciplined release engineering, code review, and structured QA at industrial scale early in career.
Education
Y Combinator — Elite startup accelerator and investor; Batch Winter 2021
University of California, Riverside — B.S. Computer Science (2006)
Interests
Raising great kids •
Hockey, climbing, hiking, biking, hot tubs •
Claude Code obsession •
Audiobooks, Hacker News, Wikipedia rabbit-hole habit