I am a software engineer with 20 years building and operating distributed systems, platforms, and cloud infrastructure at scale. I am currently building GPU infrastructure and AI workload orchestration for private clouds, and integrating agentic AI into our own engineering workflows.

A significant part of my career involved working with engineering leaders and executives on technology strategy and build vs. buy decisions, then leading engineering teams through implementation and operations. Below are some writings from both perspectives.

As AI makes software cheaper, the cost of building the wrong thing becomes the dominant risk. Strategic constraints are shifting from "can we build it" to "should we build it". If you're facing a strategic engineering decision and want a candid outside perspective from an operator who has built these systems, reach out. Most of the advice you're getting comes from someone with a stake in the answer. Mine doesn't.

Professional experience

(Since 2022): Principal Software Engineer at Midokura. We build systems to orchestrate, monitor and manage GPU servers and high-bandwidth network fabric for AI workloads, deployed in private datacenters. On an earlier project, I worked for ~3y on Sony's Edge AI sensing platform, managing fleets of cameras with intelligent sensors running AI vision models, and streaming real-time inferences to the cloud. Notable projects:

  • Design and implement systems to automate provisioning, management and operations of GPU infrastructure deployed in private datacenters, as well as multi-tenant IaaS/PaaS layers to commoditize AI workload orchestration.
  • Re-architected core backend systems (MQTT, Kafka, JVM-based) for real-time inference streaming. Achieved 100x performance improvements, with lower resource footprint.
  • Modernized release engineering and test strategy from fragile manual QA to automated delivery pipelines, reducing cycle time by 50%+ in complex embedded/cloud systems spanning distributed EU-JP teams

(2020-2022): Principal Software Engineer at New Relic. Embedded in internal platform teams managing entity inventory (hosts, containers, services, etc.), metadata and relationships.

  • Maintained critical infrastructure supporting most of New Relic's observability experience. Regularly in the critical path for ~50-75% of top-level company OKRs, and user-facing 99.8% SLAs.
  • Led design and implementation of high-throughput telemetry analysis system that processed millions of datapoints per second, inferring entity types and relationships from open, configurable rules.

(2016-2020): Staff/Principal engineer at Adevinta. Joined as lead in the Engineering Productivity team, and later became Technical Product Manager of Adevinta's internal developer platform. Served 1500+ engineers across major online marketplaces in Europe and South America.

  • Ideated, built and scaled developer tooling ahead of commercial alternatives (e.g. automated dependency propagation, developer metrics platform, etc.). Growing organically, from 0 to hundreds of users with measurable productivity gains.
  • Consolidated fragmented Infrastructure-as-a-Service projects (observability, kubernetes runtimes, etc.) into a cohesive PaaS that covered development, delivery and operations. (I published a piece about the platform).
  • Led platform migration of several marketplaces from on-premise infrastructure and EC2 to Kubernetes-based PaaS, reducing runtime and operational overhead and amplifying domain expertise from local teams to achieve impact across the wider organization. (I published some technical articles about the experience.)

(2013-2016): Senior Software Engineer at Midokura. Core contributor and technical lead on distributed network virtualization system for OpenStack, implementing SDN control plane and data plane components.

  • Designed and implemented distributed network protocols in the network agent: L2/VxLAN gateways, NAT, Floating IP, Spanning Tree Protocol.
  • Integrated control plane with hardware VTEP switches, enabling seamless physical-virtual network integration at scale (feature docs).

(Prior to 2013): I worked as a software engineer building infrastructure for telcos, and backend services for high volume sites. At Last.fm, I managed the systems responsible to ingest and serve the world's largest music catalogue at the time. At Tuenti I worked on backend systems behind groups, business and location sites.

For more details, get in touch.