About me
I build secure systems that millions of people trust with their money.
For over two decades I’ve designed the secure web platform, payments rails, and authentication that everyday banking runs on: systems built to stay up, stay private, and earn trust at national scale.
Open to advising fintech teams on secure payments at scale. Get in touch →
Selected work
Shared bank-to-bank payment rails
Built and deployed ClearXchange, the real-time network that let customers of rival banks pay each other directly, the multi-institution model the industry later unified as Zelle.
One platform, every channel
Unified desktop, mobile-web, and hybrid-app banking into a single secure platform, the front door customers pass through every day.
AI planning, flown in combat
Led the team behind an AI mission planner the U.S. Air Force ran live, scheduling more than 2,000 sorties a day.
Background
At Wells Fargo I’ve also led the technical integration of the Wachovia merger, ACH bill presentment with NACHA, an early small-business check remote-deposit platform, stronger authentication controls built to FFIEC guidance, corporate-architecture and database design, and the migration of several hundred Java applications to a Cloud Foundry PaaS.
Two books I co-authored, Reactive Design Patterns (2017) and Reactive Application Development (2018), cover the patterns and the practical Scala and Akka techniques for building resilient, elastic, message-driven distributed systems. I’ve also served as a reviewer or technical development editor on titles spanning MongoDB, legacy software re-engineering, deep learning with PyTorch, and quantum software development in Python, helping authors sharpen the technical material before it reaches readers.
My nine issued U.S. patents sit at the intersection of security, identity, and customer experience. They cover credentialing trusted applications in cloud environments; monitoring sessions, scoring per-user security, and applying adaptive friction; granting designees access to financial accounts after an adverse event detected from a user device; enriching advertisement click-throughs with consumer data; and a location-tracking design that separates encrypted location data from the keys needed to read it.
Earlier I was President of InterScales, building the content management and Akamai-integrated deployment system behind wellsfargo.com; a Technical Manager at Oracle in the Interactive Television Solutions group, where I also consulted on the Oracle8 alpha rollout and on large telecom data warehouses; and a Computer Scientist at Advanced Decision Systems (acquired by Booz, Allen & Hamilton in 1992), where I led the underlying AI mission-planning research. I started out at Kaiser Electronics prototyping flight-tested helmet-mounted display systems for fighter aircraft. I hold a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where I also played in the UC Jazz Ensembles.
