About

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY by an Italian American family. I was the kid who took things apart to understand how they worked. I saw WarGames in a theater in Brooklyn and became obsessed with computers — but my family couldn't afford one, so I'd grab RadioShack catalogs and obsess over every page.

I chased mastery through music first — guitar at Five Towns College, then conservatory cello at Brooklyn College — until I realized I loved building systems more than performing them. That drive to master something completely never went away — my wife Lisa and I took ballroom dancing to the national level, winning three first-place titles at the 2015 USA Dance National DanceSport Championship. The same thread connects music, dance, and engineering for me.

My first internet account was a Netcom shell — command line, no browser. I was optimizing autoexec.bat and config.sys on Windows 3.1 while my friends were still figuring out how to print.

In 1996, I got my first big break at Paramount Pictures. Over the next decade, I built technology for motion picture distribution and licensing — a $5 million theatrical distribution system across an international WAN, IP licensing and music clearance systems spanning Paramount and CBS Television. Annual IT budgets, SOX compliance, meetings with the division CTO. I started as a systems analyst and ended up managing the team.

In 2006, I moved to Minnesota and joined a fantasy sports company called Fanball, promoted to VP within four months. Fanball was one of the biggest platforms in the country before ESPN and Yahoo showed up with free leagues. I led a team of about 30 across product, engineering, design, and content. We built custom applications for AOL, NASCAR, PGA Tour, Discovery Channel. The company was significant enough for Liberty Media to acquire. After the acquisition, I moved on — and in 2008, I joined what's now Optum as a project management consultant. Early on, I was pulled in to lead the design and development of DBSIM — a database inventory and metrics system covering 20,000+ databases and 2 petabytes of data. I built the project plan, designed the data model, and managed the team that developed it. That work led to a full-time offer, then a promotion to Director overseeing a team of 20 across engineering and operations.

Later, I built the first application in what became a financial platform tracking billions in annual technology spend. I built v1 solo — requirements gathering, architecture, development, production deployment. I ran it in production for nearly a year before leadership gave me budget to hire. That first app became a suite, and I grew a new 20-person product organization spanning engineering, product, and QA. The platform and the team are still running.

Every chapter of my career has the same pattern: start with nothing, build something that works, prove its value, then scale it. I've had the runway to do that twice inside the same company — the conditions I want to find externally are the same ones I created here. I've never been the kind of leader who stops being technical. I still review code, stay close to architecture, and ship when needed.

Right now I'm deep in the AI engineering space — building and shipping, not just evaluating. I built Contractor Workbench end-to-end with Claude Code, and I run production agentic infrastructure with automated pipelines, multi-API integrations, and cron-scheduled tasks. My stack is JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Node.js, Angular, and SQL. My AI tools include Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. I'm leading an AI-driven product development pilot program, bringing AI coding tools into my team's daily workflow. I've been hands-on with these tools since early 2025, and the productivity gains are real.

I'm looking for a Director or Head of Engineering role where I can build platforms, modernize delivery, and lead teams that ship — ideally at a company small enough to move fast and ambitious enough to need someone who's done it before. If that's what you're building, let's talk.