the gist
My weeks split between chi.com and the CHI Color Master Factory— a salon machine that dispenses custom hair-color formulations, used in thousands of locations worldwide. On the commerce side, I lead a team of three (one engineer, two marketing and merchandising leads); the deepest features land on me, and I parcel out the rest. Recent example: a full checkout backend rewrite supporting Klarna, Afterpay, Clearpay, and Link end-to-end, payment-intent lifecycle and failure handling included. On the device side, I work alongside a senior iOS engineer and a senior Android engineer to modernize the native apps that drive the machine. We just shipped a shared-data model so multiple devices in one salon can pool client and stylist records, and we’re now refactoring native code that hadn’t been touched in years. The “technical direction” piece, in practice: code review, the features that demand deep involvement, mentoring engineers across both products, and pulling long-outsourced code toward something the in-house team can own.
currently
Principal Engineer
education
RIT · B.S. Computer Engineering
previously
Datto · Microsoft · Johnson & Johnson
the path
I started at Moog, fixing internal .NET and Java apps that hadn’t been touched in years — my first lesson in legacy code. A summer at Microsoft followed, writing C++/C# for a SQL Server batch-migration algorithm. Then a fall co-op at Johnson & Johnson, building proofs of concept in data analytics, machine learning, and computer vision. A second summer back at Microsoft — this one as a Technical Program Manager owning a third-party data-source integration — closed the early years.
Four years at Datto taught me how real SaaS gets shipped: feature teams, code review, QA, deployment, and the discipline of keeping a four-year-old web app healthy underneath it all. The stack was polyglot (Ruby on Rails, PHP and Symfony, Scala) — where the habit of “learn whichever language the problem calls for” formed.
Two years ago, Farouk Systemsbrought me in to help build the in-house engineering function — after decades as a B2B brand, the company was making a serious bet on chi.com and the Color Master Factory’s software side. Most of the work since has been less about shipping the next feature than about laying the foundation that makes every feature after it sustainable.
