A solutions architect,working at the seam betweendomains, platforms & products.
Architectural failure doesn't happen in isolation; it happens at the intersection of domains. When separate teams build separate services, the contract between them is often left unmanaged. I specialize in owning those integration points, ensuring seamless collaboration and resilient system design.
Currently lead at ITG Connect; before that, CTO at The LVG. A decade in, one lesson holds: platform-team outcomes are consuming-team outcomes. If the teams downstream of what you ship don't move faster or break less often, you didn't deliver, no matter what got merged.
The way I work has changed. Ten years ago I called myself "18/24": always on, always reachable. The job stopped rewarding that. The shift has been from scaling myself by being everywhere at once to scaling the team so they don't need me in the room.
Principal engineers don't need scaffolding. They need a clear mandate, sponsorship into rooms they can't get into alone, and honest feedback when the impact's below the bar.
I write principles down so they can be enforced, not admired. No statefulness. Backward-compatible migrations. Tests aren't optional. The build fails without them. Gates, not guidelines. The principles are foundational; the execution, incremental.
A standard becomes real the moment it's enforced on something shipping, not the moment it's written down.
- 01AgileShip in slices. Shipped and good enough beats perfect and pending. Strangler-fig over rip-and-replace.
- 02AnalyticalQuantify capacity in hours per quarter. Catch planned-versus-actual drift before it compounds.
- 03AdaptableWhen strategy reverses, hold the principles and iterate the execution.
- 04PolyglotTypeScript, Java, Python, Go, and three human languages. The handle's poly-glot for a reason.
- 05Force multiplierScale the team's capability, not my own availability. The old '18/24' default had to go.
Goals
- Make the right architecture the default: guardrails in the platform, not rules in a doc.
- Treat developer velocity as a business metric, measured built-to-released rather than spec-to-built.
- Distribute leadership by design. Build the pipeline instead of keeping a list of names I sponsor.
Pain points
- Containing the blast radius of a strategy pivot: keeping the core stable while the business experiments, without stalling the team's momentum.
- Reading a systems problem as a people problem. When output stalls, it's usually the design, not the person. The fix is intent and guardrails, not running delivery.
- 2025
Lead / Principal Engineer
ITG Connect
Boston principles. Luma DAM consolidation. ADR culture.
- 2022
Development Lead
ITG Connect
Smart Tagging. Morpheus task model. Multi-tenant Luma Proxy.
- 2018
CTO
The LVG
Founding tech. Hired, built, shipped.
- Now
Open source
github.com/poly-glot
OpenGuessr · HookLab · Amazing Landing · ECH UK.