+ Passionate about creating educational content to evangelize modern tools and practices, while actively growing in mentorship, team leadership, and business leadership roles. Dedicated to fostering open-source communities and contributing to impactful organizations.
+
+ Version Control: Expert in Git, GitHub, and self-hosted
+ Gitea instances, including mirroring and automated workflows.
+
+
+
+
Community Leadership
+
+
+ Revived the Chicago Rust Meetup chapter post-pandemic by networking with
+ the VP of Technology at Google to secure contributor access.
+
+
+ Organized a series of in-person happy-hour meetups, growing attendance
+ from 2 to over 40 regular participants within a year.
+
+
+ Fostered a collaborative and welcoming environment, re-establishing the
+ group as a hub for Rust developers in the Chicago area.
+
+
+ Authored several blog posts on Rust, Typescript & pattern matching,
+ which collectively gained 50,000 views on Medium, engaging a global audience
+ with actionable guides, leading to improved adoption of Rust and functional programming.
+
+
+ Regularly attend non-domain-specific tech meetups, serving as a
+ community pillar and mentor to 20+ aspiring developers on career advice,
+ technical skills and open-source contributions.
+
+
+
+
Experience
+
+
+
Founder, CTO · LÜM Ventures
+
Chicago IL, July 2024 - Present
+
+
+ Architected and led the development of a full-stack
+ Purescript MVP, balancing rapid delivery with long-term
+ scalability and maintainability. Built a solid foundation with
+ automated testing, monitoring, and zero tech debt,
+ ensuring seamless expansion into the full platform vision.
+
+ Designed a robust FRP-based frontend with monadic composition,
+ enabling fine-grained state management and complex dependency
+ resolution.
+
+
+ Engineered a metaprogramming-powered backend that minimizes
+ boilerplate while supporting rich, complex REST semantics.
+
+
+ Ensured strict type safety between the frontend and API, preventing
+ contract violations when deployed together.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Future-Proof Database & API Design
+
+
+ Built a 4NF PostgreSQL schema with modularity and pivot flexibility,
+ supporting the full platform roadmap.
+
+
+ Developed a bespoke migration system, ensuring seamless schema
+ evolution without external dependencies.
+
+
+ Defined an OpenAPI + JSON Schema REST API, incorporating
+ HATEOAS-style linked data for enhanced discoverability.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Reliability, Automation & CI/CD
+
+
+ Scaffolding from day one included unit & end-to-end tests, liveness
+ checks, and real-time monitoring, ensuring stability and
+ observability.
+
+
+ Implemented full CI/CD with automated deployments, minimizing
+ overhead for iteration.
+
+
+ Built an ephemeral test environment system, allowing isolated,
+ instant database instances for high-speed automated testing.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Open-Source Contributions & Thought Leadership
+
+
+ Authored technical blog posts on functional programming, Rust,
+ Typescript, sharing insights with the developer community and
+ demonstrating expertise.
+
+
+ Published multiple Purescript libraries as part of MVP development,
+ contributing back to the ecosystem.
+
+
+ Advocated for FOSS involvement, ensuring company culture aligns with
+ open-source best practices.
+
+
+ Trained a junior engineer with no prior FP experience, making them
+ productive in Purescript within a month.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Business & Product Strategy
+
+
+ Defined and continually refined product vision and roadmap,
+ validating through hands-on customer feedback.
+
+
+ Led business development efforts, networking with investors and
+ partners to drive funding and adoption.
+
+
+
+
+
+
Founder, CTO · Thunderstrike
+
Chicago, IL • June 2023 – April 2024
+
+
+ Founded and led the development of a full-stack
+ Purescript MVP, rapidly iterating on core product
+ hypotheses while balancing technical excellence with delivery. Built a
+ highly scalable, event-driven architecture and established strong
+ open-source contributions to the Purescript ecosystem.
+
+
+
Key Contributions
+
+
+ High-Performance Full-Stack Architecture
+
+
+ Developed a fully type-safe monolithic codebase in
+ Purescript, ensuring long-term maintainability and
+ rapid prototyping.
+
+
+ Designed a JSON DSL for
+ distributed web scraping, allowing complex
+ behavioral configurations.
+
+
+ Built a robust type-level API contract system,
+ ensuring zero API contract mismatches between
+ backend and frontend.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Database & Scalability Enhancements
+
+
+ Engineered a
+ highly normalized (5NF) PostgreSQL schema,
+ optimizing for performance and data integrity.
+
+
+ Leveraged
+ PL/pgSQL functions, triggers, and user-defined types
+ to improve data expressiveness and enforce constraints.
+
+
+ Created a bespoke database migration system,
+ enabling safe, source-controlled schema evolution.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Infrastructure & Event-Driven Processing
+
+
+ Built a
+ horizontally & vertically scalable distributed web
+ scraper, processing large-scale data efficiently.
+
+
+ Designed
+ containerized, platform-agnostic infrastructure,
+ ensuring easy deployment across environments.
+
+
+ Implemented event-driven architecture for
+ modularity and independent scalability.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Open-Source Contributions & Thought Leadership
+
+
+ Developed and published
+ multiple open-source Purescript libraries,
+ including:
+
+ purescript-node-stream-pipes – Stream
+ processing utilities for scalable data pipelines.
+
+
+ purescript-url-immutable – Immutable URL
+ manipulation utilities for REST and API work.
+
+
+
+
+ Advocated for FOSS contributions, establishing a
+ culture of open-source engagement.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Business Strategy & Growth
+
+
+ Defined and refined
+ company strategy, product roadmap, and investor pitch, securing early traction.
+
+
+ Led networking efforts at
+ trade shows, meetups, and investor events, driving
+ industry engagement.
+
+
+ Mentored three software engineering interns,
+ training them in functional programming and making
+ them productive in Purescript within two months.
+
+
+
+
+
+
Senior Software Engineering Team Lead · Qwick
+
Phoenix, AZ • February 2021 – March 2023
+
+
+ Led the engineering team at Qwick, where I drove the architecture and
+ implementation of scalable, high-performance systems. Spearheaded
+ initiatives that improved system reliability and streamlined engineering
+ workflows, resulting in a 40% increase in velocity and a significant
+ improvement in service reliability.
+
+ Led the transformation of Qwick's monolithic system into a
+ **distributed microservices architecture**, improving scalability
+ and deployability.
+
+
+ Implemented **event-driven architecture**, decoupling services for
+ independent scalability and reducing system bottlenecks.
+
+
+ Optimized system performance by introducing **automated performance
+ testing**, reducing average response times by 35%.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Reliability & Automation
+
+
+ Led the **migration to Kubernetes**, enabling more reliable
+ container orchestration and horizontal scaling of applications.
+
+
+ Spearheaded the implementation of **automated testing** for unit,
+ integration, and end-to-end testing, improving release cycles.
+
+
+ Developed and maintained CI/CD pipelines, reducing deployment times
+ by 60%.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Team Leadership & Mentorship
+
+
+ Managed and mentored a team of **5+ software engineers**, fostering
+ an environment of growth, collaboration, and innovation.
+
+
+ Implemented **Agile/Scrum processes**, resulting in a 40% increase
+ in sprint velocity and improving team satisfaction.
+
+
+ Organized **weekly code review sessions**, improving code quality
+ and ensuring adherence to best practices.
+
+
+
+
+
+ Cross-functional Collaboration
+
+
+ Collaborated closely with **product managers** and **designers** to
+ define features and product requirements, ensuring alignment with
+ customer needs.
+
+
+ Worked directly with the **CTO** to refine the company's technical
+ vision, roadmap, and strategic goals.
+
+
+ Coordinated with **stakeholders** to gather feedback and refine
+ development processes, ensuring that the product roadmap aligned
+ with business objectives.
+
+
+
+
+
+
Software Engineering Team Lead · TheoremOne
+
Global • April 2020 – February 2021
+
+
+ Led two engineering teams in the successful delivery of high-quality,
+ scalable software solutions for enterprise clients. Architected
+ cloud-based systems on AWS and implemented best practices that
+ significantly improved both development efficiency and product quality.
+
+
+
Software Engineer · StrongMind
+
Phoenix, AZ • March 2017 – April 2020
+
+
+ Contributed to the design and development of distributed systems
+ and applications, focusing on educational technology. Key responsibilities included optimizing processes
+ and system performance, and enhancing development efficiency.
+
- Flexible, passionate and experienced; Orion is a powerful force multiplier
- with 7 years’ experience as a software engineer & player-coach.
-
-
-
-
Skills
-
-
Javascript, HTML, CSS
-
Expert · 8 years
-
-
-
- Deep understanding of runtime semantics, exception handling,
- performance characteristics and tooling.
-
-
- Architected & implemented complex production interfaces in React, as
- well as angular, vue and svelte. Deep experience using hooks &
- functional components to manage state and complexity as the product
- scales.
-
-
- Guided teams to best practices, building systems with 3-40 active
- contributors handling 1MM requests / second with %99.999 uptime
-
-
-
-
-
Open-Source (Javascript / Typescript)
-
-
- fetch
-
- Rust-inspired structural pattern matching in JS, reducing code
- footprint and increasing expressiveness for thousands of
- repositories
-
- node-stream-pipes,
- csv-stream,
- cbor-stream,
- postgresql
-
- Compat layer between pipes and the Node standard
- library, lifting the UNIX-pipe inspired library to purely
- functional feature parity with actual UNIX pipes.
-
-
- postgresql
-
- High-level interface to libpq from purescript, supporting complex
- queries and streaming with
- COPY .. TO .. and COPY .. FROM ..
-
- At Thunderstrike, built MVP in React-inspired web framework and
- several service-oriented backend applications in Purescript.
- Demonstrated problem statement, early functionality and
- communicated value proposition to customers and investors.
- Resulted in over $100K in total contract value and an pre-seed
- raise that was in progress of $1M at a $5M cap (interrupted by
- co-founder leaving)
-
-
- At Qwick, built 4 separate user interfaces spanning all business
- verticals using FRP React in ReasonML. Was responsible for
- implementing best practices, architecting solutions and managing
- tech debt. Result was the company growing to over $10M MRR with
- tens of thousands of customers, and frontend codebases that were
- highly maintainable despite being complex.
-
-
- At TheoremOne, successfully built several highly maintainable user
- interfaces using React.
-
-
- iMercata · Managed team of 4 engineers working on
- MVP-stage UI for client company. · Was responsible for
- providing technical vision, coaching and implementing best
- practices. The client's vision was implemented quickly and
- effectively by the team, resulting in a successful
- relationship and interaction with the client company.
-
-
- GitHub · Managed team of 2 engineers working on UI and
- API for GitHub. · Was responsible for providing
- technical vision, coaching and implementing best practices.
- The client's vision was implemented quickly and effectively,
- resulting in a continued relationship between GitHub &
- TheoremOne.
-
-
-
-
- At StrongMind, built mobile app for students to take assessments,
- interact with their course performance & attendance using React
- Native.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Linux
-
Very Strong · 6 years
-
-
-
- Use Docker & Kubernetes to deploy high-availability distributed
- systems at scale. As someone passionate about predictability &
- determinism, I've used containerization to great effect, increasing
- velocity and uptime on every team I've been a part of.
-
-
- Regularly host virtual TV & movie watch parties with friends using
- on-the-fly encoding with ffmpeg to a custom cloud-hosted RTMP +
- MPEG/DASH server.
-
-
- Deep understanding of public & private network management, routing
- traffic on public network interfaces to applications running on
- local interfaces. Have encountered and debugged issues at NAT & DHCP
- layers, manage SSL certificates issued by TAs, manage DNS and mDNS
- configuration, and have implemented an application-layer networking
- runtime from
- RFC (CoAP).
-
-
- Manage synthetic video devices and hardware drivers at the
- kernel-module level.
-
-
- Use user-space utilities for an extremely productive and universal
- workflow, ex.
-
- An early adopter of Rust and passionate advocate. I've been an
- active OSS & rust discord community member for years and am a proud
- organizer of Chicago's Rust Meetup. Rust's type system, high level
- language features, developer experience, and runtime characteristics
- make it the easy choice for any mission-critical or
- performance-critical system in my eyes.
-
-
-
-
Open-Source
-
-
- slack-blocks Idiomatic API to programatically create composable Slack
- messages
-
-
- naan Abusing the type system for fun & profit.
- std-toolchain implementation of higher-kinded types
- and Haskell-esque typeclasses.
-
-
- toad
- No-std and no-alloc implementation of RFC7252 Constrained
- Application Protocol. A low-latency RESTful
- networking runtime alternative to HTTP built on UDP with reliable
- message transmission, SSL, and built-in pub/sub semantics.
- Sub-packages:
-
-
- toad-array trait abstracting
- Vec's API for any in-memory contiguous
- collections. Allows toad to simultaneously
- support systems with & without heap allocation.
-
-
- toad-map same as above, but for HashMap
-
-
- toad-string same as above, but for Strings
-
-
- toad-jni A rethinking of Java Native
- Interface (JNI) interaction in Rust.
-
-
toad-stem no-std implementation
-
toad-cursor no-std port of Cursor
-
- toad-writable no-std port of Read & Write
- traits
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Professional Experience
-
-
- At StrongMind, architected & built data pipeline ingesting 100K
- messages from disparate systems into a data warehouse. This led
- directly to higher business performance as centralized OLAP
- workflows empowered better data-driven decisionmaking. Led &
- trained team of 5 with no prior Rust experience and ICs were
- productive in it alarmingly fast!
-
-
- At Qwick, architected & built distributed event-driven system to
- reduce database load and increase uptime.
-
-
- At Thunderstrike, architected & built novel general-purpose
- distributed web scraper to ingest public information on the web en
- masse.
-
-
-
-
-
-
CICD & Automation
-
Very Strong · 7 years
-
- Have spearheaded adoption of bleeding-edge automation practices,
- implementing end to end test suites and continuous delivery pipelines.
-
-
At StrongMind, saw dev team velocity increase by 60%.
-
- At Qwick, saw dev team velocity increase by 30% as automation replaced
- manual QA testing and release strategies.
-
-
-
-
SQL
-
Very Strong · 7 years
-
- Very comfortable designing physical schemas for high performance,
- optimizing indexes for common access patterns, and using RLS for
- securing data.
-
-
- Have used many strategies to integrate relational databases with
- dynamic and strongly-typed business logic layers from highly-managed
- ORMs (ex. Flask, Entity Framework, PrismaJS) to mini-ORMs.
-
-
-
-
Player-Coach
-
Strong · 6 years
-
- Have managed teams of sizes 3-10 as a team lead (player-coach),
- accountable for success of individual team members as well as the
- team. Able to consistenly make & meet data-driven commitments, develop
- and maintain excellent relationships with team members and
- stakeholders based on accountability, candor and transparency.
-
-
- Use tools like CICD, Scrum, TDD and pair programming to increase team
- velocity without applying pressure to individual team members.
-
-
- Use frequent touchpoints with team members and a shared understanding
- of my expectations and their goals, decomposing them into measurable
- actionable steps and holding them accountable.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Other Skills
-
-
Expert
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Very Strong
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Strong
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
AWS
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
REST
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
HATEOAS
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
JIRA
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Figma
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Slack API
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
OSS Mgmt
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
OAuth, OIDC
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Python
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Scala
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Java
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
OCaml
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
C#
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Java
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
GraphQL
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
NoSQL
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Data Insights
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Machine Learning
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
ffmpeg
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Cryptography
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
WebAssembly
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Terraform
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
gRPC
-
-
-
-
-
-
Experience
-
-
thunderstrike.ai
-
Technical Founder & CTO
-
2023 - Present
-
-
- Built product MVP in Purescript & Rust in 4mo fully covered by
- automated testing, automated deployments, load testing @ 100K messages
- / second yields <100ms latency
-
-
- With CEO have signed over $100K in contract value with customers since
- foundation in October
-
-
- Perform competitor analysis, user interviews, and develop KPIs to
- continuously refresh our understanding of the problem we’re solving -
- pivoting when necessary.
-
-
- Maintain living backlog in JIRA* for transparency and accountability
-
-
- Manage 2 junior engineers, placed directly from bootcamp graduation
- 2mo ago who are now formidable and productive in Rust and Purescript.
-
-
- Develop and manage local Chicago tech community presence both for
- networking and startup representation.
-
-
-
-
-
Qwick
-
Senior Software Engineer
-
2021 - 2023
-
-
- Overhauled onboarding process, helping accelerate new junior hires
-
-
- Architected invoicing system to handle $500K MRR with near-zero
- downtime
-
-
- Oversaw team of 4 junior engineers & 1 senior engineer executing on
- invoicing system. Was responsible for individual & team outcomes.
-
-
- Led initiative to decouple and modularize existing monolithic
- architecture, transforming into a services model with several
- event-driven components, adding independent deployability and
- automated testing. This increased developer velocity by 40%,
- reliability up from %99.9 to %99.999 in 6mo
-
-
- Led agile & scrum transformation with CTO, contributing to velocity
- increase of 40%
-
-
- Led DevSecOps team, adding automated testing, CICD, system
- rearchitecture, documentation, DX improvements
-
-
- Mentored product managers helping them relax into a role of vision and
- user-advocacy, allowing dev teams to execute on well-structured
- problem statements
-
-
- Led Google Design Sprints to quickly define and validate new product
- initiatives, introducing data-driven and qualitative user research
-
-
- Organized grassroots presentations, helped team members develop and
- present their own topics
-
-
-
-
-
TheoremOne
-
Senior Lead Software Engineer
-
2020 - 2021
-
-
- Architected robust systems on AWS in Python, Ruby, React, Typescript
-
-
- Developed excellent relationships with stakeholders, communicating
- clear and frequent progress updates via demos, gathering feedback and
- requirements
-
-
- Managed 2 teams of 5-6, overhauling process increasing velocity by
- 30-40%.
-
-
-
-
-
Software Engineering Manager
-
2021
-
-
Onboarded new Client Coordinator & Product Manager
-
- Managed team of 4 full-stack engineers, 1 QA, 1 GIS engineer working
- on seed-stage MVP
-
-
Negotiated deadlines and rebuilt damaged trust with client
-
-
-
-
Product Manager
-
2021
-
-
- Owned living backlog with aggressive culling of speculative epics and
- stories so as to reduce noise and keep meaningful
-
-
- Communicated frequently with client to continually adjust forecasts,
- refine backlog and improve understanding of requirements
-
-
- Held dev team accountable for refining tickets into tasks and having
- implementation discussions with 1-2 sprint lead time.
-
-
- Ensured prior to Planning, tickets had accurate estimates, subtasks,
- and had been seen and touched by everyone who could execute on it,
- making it a 15min ceremony.
-
-
-
-
-
Strongmind
-
Software Engineer
-
2017 - 2020
-
-
- Architected & executed on robust production systems in .NET, JS, TS,
- Python & Rust on AWS & Azure. Several greenfield and legacy projects
- incl. complex distributed systems, OLAP data pipeline, data warehouse,
- mobile app development and learning management system (Canvas LMS)
- integration.
-
-
- Led several team process transformations, using process changes and
- product vision improvements to increase team velocity and happiness.
-
-
- Led adoption of new technical practices, improving maintainability and
- velcoity. Ex. transitioning from TFVC to git, automating deployment
- and UAT, containerizing products, introducing automated testing.
-
-
- Mentored several junior engineers, led 2 teams developing production
- systems that are still used with few changes today.
-
-