Resume

This is my light resume. You can email me if you’d like to learn more, or set up an appointment to talk. If you’d like just a little more detail, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Full resume (PDF). If you want to see basically every job since I finished college, my full resume covers it.

Education

B.A. East Asian Studies, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana.

Languages

English. Native speaker.

German. Somewhat rusty, but took regular courses in the Japanology and Sinology departments at a German University. Pretty comfortable reading and decent enough at speaking. Once had university-suitable writing skills but quite out of practice.

Japanese. Daily conversation. Limited literacy. Have participated in business meetings held in Japanese but still not particularly sophisticated.

Career History

  • ~17 years doing software development, with occasional bouts of program management, product focus, and team leadership.
  • ~8 years in software internationalization and QA

Major arcs

2020-Present: Chief Technology Officer. IndustrialML. Executive Director of IndustrialML GK (Japan). Converted from part-time consulting role which started spring 2019.

  • Worked closely with the CEO and our pilot customers to refine strategic direction and technical priorities, balancing short-term customer needs and long-term product goals. Built the foundations of an industrial telemetry platform, starting from proofs of concept to production deployment.
  • Designed and implemented the key systems of our SaaS platform, including our IoT gateway for factory telemetry collection, our core customer-facing web application, authorization model, a video pipeline using PoE industrial cameras for streaming and machine learning, notifications, automated capture and transcription of worker audio communications, our CI and deployment pipeline, and key infrastructure (Elixir, Phoenix, Nerves, GStreamer, C++, Membrane Framework, Github Actions, AWS).
  • Recruited, hired, onboarded, and managed engineering staff, with a range of experience, ranging from a fresh coding bootcamp graduate to people with 20+ years of industry experience.
  • Provided technical expertise in sales calls and partner meetings, and directly engaged with our customers on solutions architecture, solutions engineering, and requirements gathering efforts.
  • Made key product decisions, balancing strategic considerations, customer requests, and resource constraints.
  • Wrote high level architecture and technical design documents both for internal and external audiences.

2011-present: Principal, YuzuTen LLC. Self-employed as a consultant. Primarily work as a software developer, but occasionally do team mentoring, technical screening and hiring, teaching, and team lead work.

  • Built initial architecture and implementation of a manufacturing line telemetry platform for a US-based startup with a Japan-based manufacturing client. Developed a gateway solution that collects sensor data from programmable logic controllers and ships to an Elasticsearch Backend Elixir/OTP with a transform. Coordinated with customer to deliver visualizations and dashboards, initially in Kibana, then leveraged feedback to build a custom dashboard and alerting platform.
  • As a Technical Program Manager for a Japanese client, designed architectural solutions for a SaaS project management and customer relationship management platform with a cryptographically verifiable audit trail. Vetted vendor implementation plans and drove revisions to meet client’s platform strategy. Provided internationalization and security guidance and plotted AWS architecture approach in a system that use Designed the audit trail solution using QLDB and Elasticsearch with a mechanism to ensure GDPR-compliant PII cleansing compatibilities against an immutable data store. Drove notification microservice design supporting a publish/subscribe model to surface key system events to interested users. Solved numerous AWS infrastructure design and implementation challenges.
  • Building a curated food exporting platform with a direct-to-consumer model that reduces inventory risk using group buying model.
  • Building a crowdfunded decision-making service (Ochokochoi.com)
  • Built search services for a custom CRM system in Rails with Elasticsearch
  • Analyzed and improved performance in SQL/ActiveRecord in a complex Rails CRM app
  • Built and improved custom open-source clients in Java and JavaScript for an exception monitoring service
  • Built microservices and domain-layer logic for a Japanese fashion brand.
  • Delivered major performance improvements and a new platform for a patient scheduling system at Dendreon, a biotech firm with a late-stage prostate cancer treatment. Initially focused on a .Net based system, we replaced pieces of their architecture with JVM solutions aligned with the client’s internal technology strategy. This project required me to dive deep into a complex domain, and to integrate with a constraint solving system, ERP, and legacy database schemas, and to provide architectural guidance as we replaced legacy systems with a modern, testable, service-oriented architecture in Java + Groovy, applying a domain driven design approach.
  • Subcontracted at Windermere Solutions LLC on a Rails project, focusing on content management and blogging.

2004-2009: Founder, Yuzu Trading Co. LLC and YuzuMura.com. Ran a small wholesale business and web retail storefront selling specialty foods, ceramics and other merchandise from Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and China.

1997-2004: Software Internationalization QA at Microsoft. Started as an internationalization tester on Internet Explorer, functioned as a test lead managing about 13 people, including agency temporaries and full-time employees.

Later at Microsoft, worked as a test lead for MSN on multiple projects. Drove international sufficiency QA training to teach non-internationalization teams to catch large categories of bugs early on. Created and delivered training for our division’s first major test outsourcing effort in China.

Notable tangents

2007-2008: Senior Software Design Engineer in Test at Zillow, Inc. when company was around 150 employees.

2009-2010: Senior Software Design Engineer at The Seattle Times. New Media department. Rationalized various legacy systems.

2013-2014: Senior Software Design Engineer at Getty Images. Leveraged my Ruby and C# skills to help build a new multi-brand frontend in Rails for Asset Detail information for Getty’s stock photography brands. Backend work included extending C# WebApi based services.

Find me online