Principal Engineer and CTO who turns ideas into shipped products — building early-stage companies from 0 to 1,
several reaching 100M+ customers. My focus is using AI to augment the human experience, and I'm currently working on
agentic commerce. I've guided teams of 200+ and bring deep expertise in real-time media systems —
text, audio, video, sensor data, computer vision, and AI/ML.
I've chartered and guided hallmark products end to end. In Amazon Last Mile I helped initiate and lead VAPR, Smart Glasses,
Driver In-Dash Experiences, Edge Safety AI, and Location Understanding. At Alexa I drove the launch of Echo Auto and 100+
devices bringing the Alexa wake word to every customer, and I was a founding engineer on Alexa Communications, whose core
frameworks are used by millions. My work spans hundreds of services and millions of devices across edge, web, and mobile.
I've managed teams of 40+, mentored hundreds of engineers, and helped hire 1,000+ as an Amazon Bar Raiser.
4 granted patents + 4 in process. External recognition includes TechCrunch Startup Battlefield finalist, PC World,
PC Magazine, and Microsoft Product of the Year.
Featured Work & Press
Technical Writing
End-to-end real-time conversational AI — transport, endpointing, multi-stream fusion on an event-time timeline, the LLM core, the latency budget, and the session/KV scheduler. A full reference for building voice agents.
From the attention math up through PagedAttention, prefill vs. decode, swap-vs-recompute, and why barge-in cancellation is cheap. The systems view of LLM inference memory.
Where mouth-to-mouth latency actually goes, why endpointing dominates, and how to mask the milliseconds you can't remove.
Serialization formats and the path data takes onto the GPU — safetensors, Arrow/Parquet, pinned memory, zero-copy, and when to reach for each.
Aligning audio, vision, and text streams that arrive at different latencies onto a single event-time timeline.
How continuous batching and prefill/decode disaggregation work in a modern inference server.
Scheduling tasks with dependencies via Kahn's algorithm, visualized.
References & Cheat Sheets
The stdlib and concurrency primitives you reach for under time pressure, plus Redis patterns for distributed request routing.
Big-O for the common data structures and operations, organized the way it comes up in interviews.
Talks & Frameworks
Reimagining GE's Work-Out for the agentic era: grounded agents argue over your codebase to surface high-leverage friction, scored as a distribution rather than a single answer.
Engineering Work-Out for the Agentic Era
Experience
Principal Engineer - Amazon (April 2026 - Present)
Building in agentic commerce. (Santa Cruz, CA · Hybrid)
Founder - BrandCapsule · Freelance (Feb 2026 - Apr 2026)
Independent venture.
Principal Engineer - Amazon (November 2015 - 2026)
Driver Assistance Technologies & Safety (Aug 2023 - 2026)
Working on Driver Assistance Technologies (DAT) and Driver Safety (DIS). Combining AI/ML strategies with custom and OTS hardware
to solve difficult real world problems in driver safety and productivity. Focus on humans-first approach to augment human understanding
and capabilities. Assisted on VAPR, Smart Glasses, Safety Alerts, Hazard Detection, Location Intelligence, and AI Enhanced Personal
and Developer Productivity.
Last Mile Technologies (Sep 2020 - Aug 2023)
Working to scale delivery experience at 1, 3, and 5 year time scales. Led software for Rivian Electric Delivery Vehicles and
driver safety systems utilizing machine learning and real-time data processing to prevent incidents.
Alexa Accessories & Communications (Mar 2019 - Sep 2020)
Enabled Alexa Accessories including Echo Auto (with switchable wakeword functionality), Echo Buds, and Frames. Focused on
developer productivity and app performance, driving cold start times from awful to industry standard. Introduced architectural
modularization to deliver cross-platform features 10x faster with equivalent quality.
Alexa Mobile & Communications (Nov 2015 - Mar 2019)
Software architect for initial release of audio/video/messaging for Alexa Communications. Led cross-platform mobile rendering,
smart home systems, messaging and notifications, Voice SDK, and Alexa Accessory Kit development.
Co-founder & CTO - Tuul (May 2014 - Aug 2015)
Led team of 25+ embedding automation and bot responsiveness into text messaging for customer service and sales.
Filed 2 patents. Architected scalable infrastructure based on NoSQL (Cassandra) and distributed processing frameworks.
Principal Software Engineer - Logitech/LifeSize (Nov 2008 - Dec 2012)
Built software used by 25 million customers. Made high definition mobile video conferencing possible.
Helped provide one of the first consumer 1080p video conferencing experiences.
Lead Engineer - SightSpeed (Mar 2003 - Oct 2008)
Engineering and R&D for real-time video encoding and delivery. Multi-award winning video conferencing client
(PC Magazine/PC World Best Communications Products, Codie & Frost & Sullivan awards). Acquired by Logitech in 2008.
Key Accomplishments
TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 2014 Finalist
Competed at one of the technology industry's premier startup competitions
8 Patents (4 Granted + 4 Pending)
Innovations in video encoding/decoding, messaging systems, workflow management, and remote device command initiation
Video Collaboration Pioneer
Over 10 years of expertise in real-time media systems. Part of initial Alexa Communications launch.
Patents & Innovation
System and method for implementing workflow management using messaging
Innovations in using messaging systems to enable workflow automation and management
System and method for managing electronic conversations
Advanced techniques for conversation management and threading in electronic communications
Methods and apparatus for encoding and decoding video data
Advanced techniques for efficient video compression and transmission
System and method for archiving messages
Innovations in message archival and retrieval systems
Remote initiation of commands for user devices
Smart device automation and remote control systems
Technical Expertise
Cross Platform Development: iOS, Android, Windows, OSX, Linux
Compiled Languages: C, C++, Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin
Scripting: Python, Matlab, Javascript, Typescript
Databases: Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Redis
Distributed Systems & Graphics: Shaders, OpenGL+ES, Metal
Signaling & Messaging: SIP, XMPP, Proprietary protocols
Streaming & Media Transport: RTP, RTMP, HLS
Audio & Video Codecs: H.263, H.264, H.265, VPX, Opus
Computer Vision & ML: PyTorch, VLM, LLM
Top Skills
- H.264 Video Encoding/Decoding
- Streaming Media Systems
- Video Conferencing
- Real-time Media Processing
- Distributed Systems Architecture
- Computer Vision & AI/ML
Education & Professional Memberships
UCLA (1989-1995)
Professional Memberships:
- IEEE (Member since 2003)
- Society of Automotive Engineers (Member since 2024)
Languages
- English - Native/Bilingual proficiency
- Spanish - Limited working proficiency
