I was born and raised in Texas and graduated with a degree in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. I came to Stanford for graduate school to study Electrical Engineering and was convinced I was going to get a Ph.D. and work in a lab somewhere, but the Valley had other plans for me.
After my first internship at Flux (we were working on software for optimizing building design), I fell in love with tech and the city. I loved the idea of being able to apply what I was learning in some of my hardest math and CS classes to something that could have real-world impact. During my internship I worked on optimization problems in space planning (trying to use convex optimization to optimally design room layouts!), and received a return offer after the summer to continue working there after school. A little after I started full-time I began working more directly on hard software engineering problems and decided to deepen my software acumen as a result.
I moved from Flux to Tesla to work on Autopilot Maps and help integrate routing in the cloud for our fleet. At Tesla I learned grit: how to be unafraid when faced with overwhelming challenges or odds and how to work through the noise. I learned more at Tesla than I did anywhere else, but after a while I wanted to really hone my skills in scaling software and building systems for the cloud. My next stop was Uber in 2016.
It was a tumultous time (especially in the latter half of 2016 and 2017), but at Uber I learned how to write software that scales, how to build systems when you don't know how it's all connected (e.g. when you're working with more than a thousand other engineers!), and how to build code responsibily (I crashed production more than my fair share of times and paid for it during on-call).
In the middle of 2017 I received an incredible opportunity to work at rideOS (later acquired by GoPuff). We had a vision to build all of the maps services we felt autonomous vehicles would need: constraint-based routing, real-time data update brokerages, basemaps built for autonomous vehicles, and fleet optimization that could incorporate the needs of a heterogenous fleet of vehicles. At rideOS I learned how to build when there was no obvious product in sight. We spent many afternoons at my CEO (Justin Ho's) apartment, suffering through cat allergies, and trying to figure out what we should build and who would even buy it! I loved getting to build all of our technology from scratch; I had a deep understanding of how every piece of our system worked, scaled (or didn't), and what would break or what wouldn't.
After a while, the focus of our company shifted a bit away from autonomous vehicles. We realized that AV companies would never want to outsource their behavioral stacks (e.g. routing), and so in 2020 I left rideOS for Waymo to work directly on the routing and reasoning teams to hone my understanding of robotics, online motion planning, and autonomous vehicles. At Waymo I learned the craft of software engineering, how to communicate my vision across many teams (especially at a time when many of our employees worked remotely), and how to exercise patience in software. Waymo taught me that moving slowly doesn't mean not moving at all, and that sometimes less code can accomplish more (their slow, but steady expansion is testament to that!)
After Waymo (and just after the birth of my first child) I realized I was ready to step up into a leadership position and I joined Zipline in at the end of 2022 as the lead of the Flight Routes team. The role combined my knowledge of routing and maps data for a unique use case (providing routes for drones!) I loved my time at Zipline and learned just how wrong I was about what it means to be an effective engineering leader. I ended my time at Zipline after nearly three years, working on problems ranging from fully migrating our planning algorithms and architecture from Python to Rust, growing our scope rapidly to incorporate spatial planning across new expansions, and growing my team professionally and as people.
I left Zipline because I wanted to find a way of doing the three things I love most:
So now I'm offering technical advisory, coaching, mentoring, and finding like-minded folks who want to work on hard problems.