Fit Notes

This is candid. It’s more useful to both sides if I’m direct about where I work well and where I don’t.

Best-Fit Environments

• AI-forward product and platform teams. I’m most useful where AI is a core capability, not an experiment. I’ve built with AI tools extensively and have judgment about where they accelerate and where they mislead.
• Companies that value senior judgment and hands-on technical leadership. I’m not a pure people-manager. I stay close to the code, and I’m most effective when that’s valued rather than questioned.
• Teams with real ambiguity and need for systems thinking. I do my best work when the problem isn’t well-defined yet — when the first job is figuring out what to build and why.
• Remote-first or genuinely remote-friendly teams. I’ve led distributed teams for years. I know how to do it well, and I don’t want to work somewhere that treats remote as a compromise.

Poor-Fit Environments

• Heavy travel roles. I’m clear about this up front to avoid wasting anyone’s time.
• Customer-facing roles requiring more than 10% travel. Including customer visits, offsites, conferences, and kickoff weeks.
• Pure people-management roles far from the work. If the role is entirely about process, headcount planning, and stakeholder management with no technical involvement, it’s not the right match.
• Environments where role charter is unclear but authority is absent. I’ve been in roles where the scope was ambitious but the authority to execute was missing. I’m direct about needing alignment on both.
• Cultures that mistake chaos for urgency. I move fast, but I don’t confuse motion with progress. If the environment rewards heroics over systems, I’m not the right fit.

Travel constraint: Under 10% total annual travel, including customer visits, offsites, conferences, and kickoff weeks.

What I Bring to the Right Environment

When the fit is right, I bring:

• An engineering leader who can credibly operate from product strategy to production code
• AI-forward judgment built from extensive hands-on building, not just reading about it
• A track record of scaling teams, building platforms, and improving operational practices
• Direct, low-ego communication — I say what I think, I listen to what you think, and I change my mind when the evidence warrants it