Character Arc
My journey as a professional engineer began in the early 2000s in what can only be described as a web 1.0 world. I worked on LAMP-stack applications for various industries, including insurance, online education, and publishing. These early experiences gave me a solid engineering foundation and imbued me with a deep passion for innovation.
In 2012, I joined IDEXX where I stayed for a decade. I started as an individual contributor, but it was not long before I was given the opportunity to lead teams and drive impactful projects. During my tenure at the company, I was involved in the M&A process where I performed technical due diligence and led teambuilding efforts for acquired projects. Starting with a 3-person core engineering team I recruited from within the company, I would build 15–20-person engineering teams to work alongside me. During this period, IDEXX was named to the S&P 500, an index of the top 500 companies in the US economy and I was leading development on its flagship software products.
My passion for innovation led me to explore blockchain technology. In fact, I was an early adopter of Bitcoin, mining it in late 2010. In 2017, I dove into Ethereum, Solidity, and dApp development and was fascinated by the potential of decentralized applications to transform various industries. I was the driving force behind the development of a Blockchain R&D department at IDEXX, where I led a team of 7 people for 2 years and developed a chain of custody auditing protocol that reported to the USDA and FDA. During this time, I gained deep expertise in the technical and operational aspects of blockchain technology and helped others within the company understand this emerging paradigm-shift.
After realizing that enterprise blockchain was not going to take off I left the company, moving from a 10,000-person multinational corporation to a 20-person startup. There, I worked on the problems of onchain identity, KYC, AML, and the interplay of those for Sybil protection during on-chain token sales. I was drawn to the startup environment, which offered more autonomy and opportunity to work on emerging problems in cutting-edge technologies.
In February 2022, I met my co-founders and we started our company, Elixir. After months of brainstorming and whiteboarding, we were convinced that we could disrupt the centralized players in the Market Making space. For the past year and a half, we have been working to build a revolutionary financial primitive: decentralized algorithmic market making for central limit order books. As the CTO, I designed, architected, and coded the first iteration of the protocol—a full DPoS network that performs algorithmic market making on centralized exchange pairs. I built a team of 4 engineers, and we have successfully launched 2 testnet releases, onboarded 10,000 validators, and completed a Series A fundraise at a $150m valuation.
As a technology leader, I bring a unique blend of technical ability, corporate business acumen, and leadership skills to the table. I am a problem solver to my core, and I thrive in complex fast-paced environments where the speed of innovation is the name of the game. I am truly passionate about blockchains and their potential to transform industries and excited to bring my extensive experience to the table.
Chief Technical Officer
Co-founder and CTO of Elixir, all decisions run through me. I oversee all technical aspects of the company, including hiring, and managing a team of engineers, setting up development processes, and settling technical strategy. I designed and coded the first version of the protocol, a full DPoS network that does algorithmic market-making won centralized exchange pairs. I spun up our AWS infrastructure from scratch, which includes designing and implementing a secure and scalable cloud architecture to support our platform's growth to 15,000 users. I work closely with our CEO and COO to ensure that our technical decisions are aligned with our strategic priorities. In addition to my technical duties, I played a key role in fundraising efforts, meeting with investors and presenting our technology to business partners.
Overall, my experience as a CTO has allowed me to leverage my technical expertise to build a successful blockchain protocol from the ground up while also managing and leading a team of engineers my ability to balance technical and business considerations combined with my deep knowledge of blockchain technology and cloud infrastructure has enable me to turn our vision into a secure, scalable, and innovative platform with widespread recognition in the industry.
Accomplishments
- Developed and implemented a distributed consensus algorithm for our DPoS network, ensuring fast transaction processing times and high network throughput for algorithmic market making.
- Designing and implementing a high-performance market-making engine that uses a modified Avellaneda-Stoikov strategy for delta-neutral market-making on central limit order books.
- Implementing robust security mechanisms through token economics, dedicating a security budget and crypto-economic incentives to the protocol.
- Recruited, interviewed, hired, and trained all engineering staff and lead them the team as an individual contributor following Lean engineering methodologies.
- Designed and implemented all AWS architecture and DevOps practices, including IAM, ECS and EC2 infrastructure, Autoscaling, and data pipelines.
Head of Engineering
Tokensoft brought me on after their successful Seed round to help accelerate and grow their R&D division in the wake of the CTO stepping back from day-to-day operations. I wore many hats at the company, serving as a manager and mentor to developers, an architect to the business team, and a director aligning engineering efforts across lines of business.
Accomplishments
- Quickly assuming responsibility after a streak of departures of the core team.
- Finding process bottlenecks and targeting releases to accelerate token launches resulting in a 5x increase in launch volume and more revenue in Q4 than in Q1-3 combined.
- Merging engineering paradigms and reporting structure in the R&D organization across multiple lines of business.
- Leading the hiring processes across the company to build a world-class, remote-first engineering organization.
Blockchain R&D Lead
While leading an engineering team at IDEXX, I conceived of a blockchain -based chain-of-custody system to track diagnostic samples across our global organization. I pitched this project and received funding for a research team to prototype solution built on an in-house blockchain. I brought together a cross- functional from sources across the company and led that team until the project’s end.
Accomplishments
- Architected an Ethereum-based blockchain system for chain-of-custody tracking.
- Recruited and led an innovation team which built out an Ethereum-based blockchain system for chain-of-custody tracking, auditing, and management.
- Developed and launched a private blockchain network internal to the organization.
- Built a CI/CD pipeline for managing development cycle of Web3 tools.
- Oversaw the internal recruitment efforts across the organization, building to a 7-person team.
- Responsible for capital allocation requests and project management.
Technical Lead, Principle Engineer
Originally hired as a build automation contractor, I was brought on full-time in less than a year and grew within the organization through multiple promotions, becoming the Technical Lead for two teams. Instrumental in the acquisition of IDEXX Neo, building a team and bringing the product’s code up to company standards. As the technical lead, I spearheaded process improvements and restructured the team to increase the yearly release rate by a factor of 8x over two years while increasing reliability and reducing defects. Working across the organization, and in close coordination with product, Neo became the flagship Practice Information Management Software in the US, Canadian, and Australian markets.
Accomplishments
- Assembled an international, remote-first team of 15-25 people and through strong leadership mentored them to maximize their skills and potential.
- Lead the transition to Kanban and reorganized the team to take product from a monthly release cycle to multiple deploys per week.
- Implemented a strategy to support partnerships and product initiatives through integrations that provide customers with a rich ecosystem to maximize efficiency.
- Architected internal integrations with complimentary services, differentiating our product and leading to 29% year-over-year growth.
- Integrated third-party applications—Credit Card Processing, Diagnostic Orders, Electronic Medical Records, and Whiteboarding.
- Represented the development organization as a member of senior leadership team.