Director of Software Engineering
I'm a software engineering leader in the Twin Cities. I currently lead technical architecture at Optum Behavioral Health — the shared platform that 180+ applications run on, serving more than six million members. Before that I ran engineering teams at Amazon and CVS Health. I've been writing code for over twenty years, and I still enjoy it.
I lead the technical architecture team for Optum's behavioral health division. My team owns the shared API layer that carries 180+ web applications, thirty of them critical.
I work with the CTO office on engineering maturity, and I'm driving a generative-AI program in utilization management — applying large language models to help review clinical decisions.
I ran a two-pizza team on Buy with Prime, Amazon's merchant checkout product. We shipped changes that touched shopper and merchant discovery, working across several teams inside the program.
The scale was enormous — which is exactly why you learn to keep things simple.
I managed five scrum teams — about thirty engineers across five locations — building medical and pharmacy benefit systems.
The work I'm proudest of: an oncology prior-authorization system with a machine-learning recommendation engine that cut review time from two weeks to minutes, and a claims system that saved clients over eight million dollars a year.
Designed enterprise integrations — BizTalk, SSIS, .NET services and Web APIs — including a custom eConnect adapter for Microsoft Great Plains transactions.
Built B2B and B2C web applications with ASP, XML/XSLT, SQL Server, and Commerce Server — full-text search, SSL, and everything around it.
A regimen-based authorization system with a machine-learning recommendation engine for oncologists. Cut prior-authorization processing from two weeks to minutes.
Rebuilt the claims and rebate pipeline — saved clients more than eight million dollars a year.
Migrated the medical claim editing system to Azure with Docker — a modernization that retired a datacenter dependency.
A playground project I built with friends to try new things: Spring Boot, Gradle, Neo4J, Docker, Ionic 2, and a CI pipeline to hold it together.
Thirty-plus repositories contributed to over the years — including work preserved in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault.
For two years I taught a weekly natural-language-processing class to middle and high school students.
I founded a non-profit that promotes STEM to young people.
I'm an active volunteer in my local community and helped start a local ethnic group.