Experience

I tell stories and build the technology that carries them. For twenty years that meant engineering and leading teams for some of the biggest names in media. Today it means ht.live, the productions made there, and independent technical work through my own consulting company.

Brands I've built for

  • The Wall Street Journal
  • Dow Jones
  • CNN
  • NBCUniversal
  • Turner Sports
  • NASCAR
  • NCAA
  • Entertainment Weekly
  • People en Español
  • Essence
  • Southern Living
  • Travel + Leisure
  • Better Homes & Gardens
  • Allrecipes
  • Departures
  • Where Traveler
  • Savannah
  • Saks Off 5th
  • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Urban Institute
  • The Trevor Project
  • Thor Equities
  • Denny's
  • Gun Safety Alliance

Independent work

ht.live

Founder and managing director · Edina, MN · 2017 to now

  • A nonprofit media production studio and performing arts venue in Southdale Center: more than 200 events produced.
  • Live ticketed shows, podcasts, documentary work and a channel for what we record. The whole picture

companyname.tv

Founder and principal consultant · 2005 to now

  • A technology consulting practice for media, publishing and AI companies, and how I make a living.
  • Scalable content platforms, system architecture and web development.
  • AI evaluation and data work: human-in-the-loop review, rubrics and quality thresholds for model output, and data annotation across audio, video, image and text.
  • Code generation, review and validation, including support for teams working with AI-generated code.

Gun Safety Alliance

Video and technology

  • Short documentary origin stories about the organisations doing gun-violence prevention work.
  • The alliance's website, including self-hosted adaptive video, and help on the tech side.

Career

Dow Jones

Engineering Manager, Audio/Video and Content API · Minneapolis · 2023 to 2025

  • Managed a 20-engineer organisation delivering audio and video features and content APIs.
  • Raised data-delivery reliability 30% across The Wall Street Journal and three other brands.
  • Cut deployment failures 85% through CI/CD automation, automated testing and incident process.
  • Technical point of contact and decision maker for frontier AI providers and startups pitching the company, building proofs of concept to test generative AI and text-to-speech tools against newsroom needs before adoption.

Saks Fifth Avenue (Hudson's Bay Company)

Technical Team Lead and Chief Scrum Master · New York · 2021 to 2023

  • Improved site speed 60% and checkout conversion 23% on the e-commerce storefront.
  • Led an agile transformation using SAFe, moving teams from Kanban to Scrum.
  • Cut time to market for new features 40%.

Time Inc. (acquired by Meredith, 2018)

Technical Lead, Senior Software Engineer and Scrum Master · New York · 2015 to 2021

  • Designed and built a shared framework behind 40+ entertainment sites for a network that reached a record 139 million U.S. visitors a month (comScore, September 2017).
  • Architected audio, video and multimedia delivery for editorial teams across publishing platforms.
  • Halved content publishing time by automating editorial workflows.
  • Ran content and technical SEO audits across the brand portfolio.

Elephant Ventures

Director of Engineering · New York · 2014 to 2015

  • Grew the development team from 3 to 12 engineers.
  • Set code review standards that cut production bugs 70%.

Earlier

  • Time Inc., Technical Lead, 2013 to 2014: led development of Essence.com and PeopleEnEspanol.com on Drupal.
  • NBCUniversal, Lead Drupal Developer, 2013: responsive themes and interface components for NBC digital properties.
  • University of North Carolina, Drupal Consultant, 2011 to 2012: site architecture and launches for Student Affairs, Campus Health, the Carolina Union and campus digital signage.
  • Turner Sports, Front-End Developer, 2010 to 2011: front-end work on the league sites Turner built under contract, including responsive prototypes for NASCAR.com and NCAA.com and work for the NBA.
  • Morris DigitalWorks, Drupal Developer, 2007 to 2013: lead theme developer for one Drupal platform behind 13 daily newspaper sites, including jacksonville.com, chronicle.augusta.com, onlineathens.com and cjonline.com, and the trainer who brought each newsroom onto it.

Recognition and certifications

  • Google Search Console Advisory Board, 2016 to 2019, representing media and entertainment
  • Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), Scrum Alliance, 2015
  • Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Scrum Alliance, 2014

Skills

  • Front end and design systems: responsive web design, grid-based design systems (Foundation, Bootstrap), Sass, HTML and CSS, accessible and fast pages
  • Engineering: JavaScript and TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, PHP and Drupal, REST and GraphQL APIs, MySQL, CI/CD, system design
  • AI systems: designing and implementing AI harnesses that wire up multiple frontier models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over an organisation's own knowledge, and context-driven workflows built around how the business actually runs, with self-hosted and local options when data needs to stay private
  • AI evaluation and data: model evaluation, rubric design, quality thresholds, data annotation
  • Video and streaming: capture, adaptive HLS packaging and playback, transcription pipelines
  • Search and performance: technical SEO audits, Core Web Vitals, analytics
  • Leadership and delivery: team management and mentoring, Scrum and SAFe, roadmaps, stakeholder management
  • Media: video editing, podcast production, Adobe Creative Suite

Education

American Intercontinental University: Communications; Film and Media Production.

More on LinkedIn, or get in touch.