I grew up in Islamorada, a village in the Florida Keys, and lived there until I was 18. The Keys are a chain of islands connected to the mainland by a single highway, so most of what I did growing up happened in or on the water — swimming, free diving, and spearfishing.

I attended Coral Shores High School, where I was a member and co-captain of the swim team and competed at the district and regional levels in the 200m freestyle and 100m butterfly.

In 2005 I was accepted into the College of Business at Florida State University. While at FSU I was an active member of the Theta Chi fraternity, which at the time was known for its philanthropic involvement, its record in intramural athletics, and holding the highest overall GPA of any fraternity on campus.

I served as Brotherhood Chairman for one year, organizing our annual retreat and other internal events, and as Athletic Chairman for two years, assembling teams and coordinating our participation in intramural sports. In 2009 I earned my B.S. in Finance and Real Estate.

I enlisted in 2010 with the goal of becoming a Navy SEAL. I made it through boot camp, additional physical training, and the first three weeks of BUD/S before not being selected to continue. I chose to pursue the Intelligence Specialist rating instead, and that failure became my motivation: I graduated at the top of my class at the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center in Dam Neck, Virginia, and earned an invitation to screen for Naval Special Warfare Development Group. I began my tour of duty in April 2011.

I served four overseas combat deployments, taking on roles not commonly assigned to Intelligence Specialists: Analyst, ISR Manager coordinating more than 10,000 hours of manned and unmanned ISR assets, CIA Liaison Officer, and Joint Staff Intelligence Officer (J2) for a 70-person task force — a position normally reserved for officers. I was honorably discharged in January 2016 as a Petty Officer Second Class.

The Navy put me in front of experienced leaders on a regular basis, conditioned me to be an effective communicator, and ingrained the importance of attention to detail. I still rely on all three every day as an engineering leader.

I began learning to write code as a hobby while I was still in the Navy, and quickly realized software was the field I wanted to pursue professionally. My first role was as a Junior PHP Developer at Partner Weekly in Las Vegas, where I learned the fundamentals of software development, became active in the local PHP community, and began contributing to and publishing open-source projects.

After a little over a year I joined Switch, Inc. as a Software Engineer, building the back-end systems and APIs that supported the company’s day-to-day operations. I was promoted to Manager of Software Engineering in 2019, leading a team of eight engineers. My most significant contribution was an automated CI/CD pipeline that became the standard way the engineering org built and deployed applications.

In April 2023 I joined Guidepoint Global as Lead Software Engineer. I was promoted to Software Engineering Manager in 2025 and to Senior Software Engineering Manager in January 2026. Today I lead architecture and delivery for our next-generation agentic platform: MCP-based tooling, AKS-hosted services, and the reliability and auth models that production agentic systems demand.

By 2020 I was managing engineers at Switch and wanted to grow on the business side the way I had on the technical side. I applied to the Executive MBA program at UNLV’s Lee Business School to prepare myself to make decisive and impactful business decisions, and I completed the program in 2022.

The most valuable thing I took away was a financial lens on engineering work: how executives think about capital allocation, how to translate a technical proposal into a business case, and how to argue for an investment in terms of return and opportunity cost rather than technical correctness. It changed how I evaluate technical decisions and how I communicate with stakeholders outside of engineering.

These days I spend most of my free time trad climbing in Red Rock Canyon, just outside Las Vegas — long, multi-pitch sandstone routes where I place my own protection as I go.

Climbing rewards the same habits the Navy did: thorough preparation, attention to detail, and clear decision-making under pressure. It also keeps me honest about knowing when to push on and when to back off and come back another day.