About

I'm an engineering leader in New York City. At Simple Fractal I manage a team of seven engineers building automation systems for healthcare companies — the kind of work where the data is regulated, the uptime matters, and a quiet failure is worse than a loud one.

I didn't start in software. I spent four years as a GS12 analytical chemist at the FDA, testing and reviewing pharmaceutical data. What stuck with me wasn't the chemistry — it was how much of the lab ran on paper and manual transcription. I started writing Python, R, and JavaScript to fix it, built electronic worksheet systems that cut analysis turnaround to a single day, and learned more about the leverage of software from that than from anything else I'd done. I went to Fullstack Academy to learn to do it properly.

The regulated-environment instinct turned out to be unexpectedly transferable. Pharmaceutical testing and healthcare software have similar attitudes toward evidence, traceability, and what happens when you get it wrong — which is most of why I ended up owning compliance and reliability work rather than avoiding it.

These days I spend my time on cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, and figuring out where AI genuinely helps an engineering team versus where it just adds surface area. I'm currently building a HIPAA-compliant internal AI platform, which is a good forcing function for that question.