Principal Platform & Systems Architect

20+ years building products, platforms, and distributed systems that remain understandable as they scale. A first/founding engineer by background, taking on contract work focused on technical scoping, planning, architecture review, systems modeling, and greenfield builds. Comfortable owning problems end-to-end from initial scoping through architecture and into a working v1, with clear communication on scope, risk, and tradeoffs. Recent work includes building messaging systems, deploying real-time pipelines and recommendation systems, launching browser-based video editing platforms, and scaling event ingestion. Works best when talking directly to the problem owner and is open to starting with a short, well-scoped first deliverable. Pragmatic about LLMs for exploration, debugging, documentation, and tightly scoped implementation with strong engineering judgment and rigid testing.