Career

Head of Data Engineering

Mar 2022 – Present

Leading Automattic's data engineering team — the engineers behind the central self-hosted data platform powering analytics and AI across WordPress.com, Tumblr, and WooCommerce.

• Lead a team of 5–7 data-platform engineers owning the company's central self-hosted data platform (Spark, Trino, Airflow, Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Superset, Looker, JupyterHub) — roadmap, planning, reviews, and production operations.
• Set the team's AI-enablement strategy and led its delivery across the team: a program of MCP servers (Trino, Superset, Looker, data catalog) giving LLM agents governed access to company data; defined the next phase — AI evaluation, observability, and domain-scoped data assistants.
• Designed data-access governance for AI agents: least-privilege, tag-based, read-only warehouse access enforced with policy-as-code (Open Policy Agent).
• Put LLM evaluation into CI: an LLM-as-judge harness verifying documentation produces correct AI-agent behavior ("TDD for docs").
• Coordinated the team's migration of the warehouse to Apache Iceberg — the platform's move to an open lakehouse table format — while personally contributing 50+ merged improvements on Iceberg reliability, snapshot retention, and storage optimization.
• Drove a data-contract integrity program on Apache Iceberg: automated contract-violation checks, fixes to billion-row production tables, and major storage and compute cost optimizations.
• Represent the data platform across the company: AI data-tooling and access-policy decisions, security collaboration (member of the security incident response team), and the editorial group of Automattic's public data blog.
• Still hands-on: one of the platform's top contributors with 2,000+ merged changes; led every major Airflow production upgrade, through Airflow 3.

Senior Data Engineer

Feb 2019 – Mar 2022

• Core engineer of the data platform from its early days: introduced Airflow to the company in 2019 and later drove the Airflow 2.0 migration.
• Designed a self-service SQL transformation framework that removed a 5-engineer bottleneck: 50+ people across the company now contribute 700+ production data transformations. (read the story)
• Implemented data retention and deletion at the core product-analytics event store (GDPR-driven).
• Migrated the platform from Cloudera Hadoop to a Docker-based on-premises stack; established CI/CD, quality gates, and static code analysis in the data org.

Team/Tech Lead in Analytics

• Led data engineering and ML topics in the Analytics department — ETL platform, data warehouse, and production ML services.
• Shipped ML microservices to production on Google App Engine (Python, scikit-learn).
• Migrated analytics infrastructure to Google Cloud (BigQuery, GAE, GCE), cutting infrastructure and maintenance costs.
• Embedded quality into the development process and shortened CI/CD feedback loops.

Test Automation Lead

• Built the Web department's test-automation capability from scratch — technology, process, hiring, and infrastructure — at a gaming company with 100M+ registered players.
• Ran a company-wide test-automation community connecting projects, departments, and regional offices.
• Drove a shift-left test strategy, moving the bulk of automation from UI to API and unit tests.
• Authored open-source testing libraries webium and grail, published on PyPI under the Wargaming GitHub org. (webium)

Automated Testing Consultant

• Consulted on test-automation development: framework creation and enhancements, process improvements, and training.
• Performance testing of business-critical telecom systems.

Trainer and Consultant

Mar 2012 – Jul 2013

• Delivered Selenium/WebDriver training and consulted delivery teams on test automation.

Software Testing Team Lead

Jul 2009 – Feb 2012

• Managed a team of 20 engineers supporting UI automation for the Oracle ATG eCommerce product.
• Implemented an open-source-based solution for testing Flex applications.

QA Specialist

• Led multiple automated and performance-testing projects.
• Developed automated and performance test scripts; black-box testing.