Skip to main content

The story behind the systems.

I came to engineering sideways.

Platform and Data Engineering Manager at Valeo Financial Advisors

My path through EMS, data science, and financial planning led me to engineering leadership. I now work directly with executive leadership to guide the engineering team and shape the systems the firm depends on.

Range is the point.

I spent nearly ten years as an EMT, taught myself data science, became a financial advisor, and earned my CFP® certification. Emilie Wapnick's talk on “multipotentialites” gave me a name for the pattern: curiosity across disciplines and the ability to carry useful ideas between them. Advising taught me financial services from the inside. When the tools couldn't keep up, I started building my own — first as spreadsheets, eventually as the firm's platform.

I build for the people inside the system.

EMS taught me to communicate clearly when the stakes are high and the person in front of me is having one of the worst days of their life. Financial advising taught me that the mathematically optimal answer is not always the best answer for the person who has to live with it. Those are engineering lessons now.

They shape the requirements I write, the defaults and failure modes I choose, and what I automate. I think about what people know, what they may do under pressure, what incentives a design creates, and whether a tool makes the job easier without asking someone to become a technologist. If a system is harder to use than doing the job by hand, it isn't a good system, no matter how clever the engineering is.

The work and the team.

I partner with executive, finance, and investment leadership to set priorities and make technical tradeoffs clear. I’m responsible for the engineering team, application architecture, infrastructure, and data systems. I also set the standards for how we build, review, and operate software. I set goals, give direct feedback, and make ownership clear while staying involved in implementation.

AI-assisted development is part of that work. I focus on the shared context and review practices that help the team use these tools responsibly; technical judgment and production responsibility stay with people.

After hours, the same instincts show up in browser games, home automation, cosplay, and anything else with an interesting system hiding inside it.

The path here

  1. Sep 2026 – present

    Platform and Data Engineering Manager

    Valeo Financial Advisors

    Leads engineering for internal applications and data in partnership with executive leadership.

  2. Apr 2026 – Sep 2026

    Business Systems Lead

    Valeo Financial Advisors

    Led business systems and platform delivery.

  3. May 2023 – Mar 2026

    Business Systems Analyst

    Valeo Financial Advisors

    Salesforce implementation lead & platform owner; cross-system automation.

  4. Jul 2021 – May 2023

    Financial Advisor

    Valeo Financial Advisors

    Advisory work on the CFP® certification track.

  5. 2019 – 2023

    Co-founder and COO

    Kmbara

    Small, part-time venture with my brother; kept operations running.

  6. Jun 2019 – Jan 2020

    Data Scientist

    American Express Global Business Travel

    Applied Python and data science in a commercial analytics role.

  7. ~a decade (earlier career)

    EMT

    Emergency medical services