Staff software engineer

Hi, I'm Tim. I picked up coding back in 2011 because I love to build, and I've spent the fifteen years since chasing bigger versions of that.

I started in data. My first eight years were warehouses and pipelines, in consulting and at Microsoft, built for the people who needed the numbers: Marketing, Finance, Sales. Underneath it the job never changed. Sit with someone who knows the business, figure out what they actually need, build the system that gives it to them. In 2017 I built my first product on my own, a text-messaging platform for personal health goals, and learned I'd rather be closer to the thing being built than to the reporting on it.

In 2019 I joined Hone, a live leadership development platform, as the fifth employee, and went into the Series A as the only engineer at the company, owning the application, the infrastructure, and the data by myself. After we raised, I stayed hands-on while building the engineering organization around me: hiring our CTO and Director of Engineering, which put me in the unusual position of interviewing my own future boss, growing engineering into three teams in about six months, and leading the effort that delivered our SOC 2 Type I certification.

Now I'm at DRINKS, an e-commerce compliance company, as its first staff engineer, owning core platform architecture and technical design across the org. Alongside that I founded Determa, an AI scribe for dermatologists, and built it solo all the way to paying customers: real-time medical transcription, an LLM pipeline for clinical notes, HIPAA compliance end to end.

I've lived the exhilaration of launching and the dread when it's all burning down. The decisions worth talking about in an interview are the ones with real tradeoffs, and that's what this site is built around.