Senior Engineering Manager

Building the Golden Path for Cloud Operations.

I lead the team that keeps AWS running smoothly—and keeps the bill from getting out of hand.

View Career Resume

Leadership Snapshot

Building Platforms, Not Bottlenecks.

I've spent 10+ years building data and cloud systems, and the last two leading the Cloud Ops team. My focus is removing blockers so teams ship faster without sacrificing reliability—whether that's standing up self-service infrastructure, modernizing legacy databases, or renegotiating vendor contracts.

Current Focus Enablement & FinOps
  • Platform Enablement: Designed and deployed self-service Golden Path CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code templates, accelerating developer onboarding and reducing deployment friction.
  • FinOps: Implemented flexible commitment strategies and automated spend anomaly detection, achieving $650K+ in annual cloud cost savings.
  • Legacy Reduction: Led workload retirement and cloud migration initiatives, reducing EC2 footprint by 60% and lowering operational overhead.
  • Disaster Recovery: Architected air-gapped backup solutions and optimized recovery procedures, improving RTO from 12 hours to under 4 hours.
  • Service Desk: Integrated Jira Service Management with CI/CD pipelines to automate change logging and eliminate manual change tracking.

By The Numbers

Measurable impact delivered in the last 24 months.

~$650k

Annual Cloud Savings

Cut waste by renegotiating vendor contracts, shifting to flexible commitments that actually fit our roadmap, and killing redundant services that nobody was paying attention to.

60%

Legacy Footprint Reduced

Migrated workloads to managed services like RDS and containerized applications where appropriate, while decommissioning redundant systems to reduce operational overhead.

3x Faster

Recovery Time Objective

Reduced RTO from 12+ hours to under 4 hours by implementing distributed backup strategies, automated failover procedures, and comprehensive disaster recovery testing.

4

Global Time Zones

Successfully built and managed globally a distributed Cloud Ops team across US, Europe, and Central America. Implemented systems and processes that enable effective async collaboration while maintaining accountability and quality standards.

6x

Core Value
Awards Nominee

2x

Techie
Award Winner

Nominated 6 times for cost-conscious practices. Won the Techie Award twice—once for cloud spend optimization, once for coaching. 2018–2025.

20+

Database Systems

Migrated 20+ database systems from self-managed infrastructure to fully managed services like RDS and MongoDB Atlas, reducing maintenance complexity and improving reliability.

Professional Journey

Manager of Cloud Ops

EF Education First

Oct 2023 – Nov 2025

  • Team Shift: Moved the team from firefighting tickets to building self-service tools devs actually want to use.
  • Cost Savings: Cut ~$650k/year from our cloud bill. Used Archera to make our commitments flexible so we can modernize without penalties.
  • Disaster Recovery: Set up air-gapped backups with Clumio. Recovery went from 12+ hours to under 4.
  • Service Desk: Rolled out JSM and connected it to our CI/CD. No more hidden work or manual change tracking.

Staff Database Engineer

EF Education First

Mar 2022 – Oct 2023

  • Modernized 20+ core service backends by shifting self-hosted EC2 databases to fully managed RDS & Atlas clusters, improving reliability and engineering velocity.
  • Engineered Terraform modules to automate security baselines and compliance for accounts provisioned via AWS Control Tower.
  • Accelerated release velocity by overhauling database deployment pipelines within the CI/CD platform (Redgate), reducing friction and failure rates for application developers.
  • Owned the long-term database strategy and presented Monthly Business Reviews (MBR) to leadership. Mentored remote EPAM contractors to ensure code quality and architectural alignment.

Senior DBA

EF Education First

Aug 2020 – Mar 2022

  • Platform Reliability: Primary SME for all dev/prod database infrastructure across cloud providers—EC2/Azure VMs, MS SQL, MongoDB, DocumentDB, Azure SQL.
  • Performance & Observability: Deployed SQL Sentry for deep query analysis and proactive alerting, shifting the team from reactive firefighting to preventative ops.
  • Backup Modernization: Transitioned from legacy backup software to Quest LiteSpeed, achieving 100% recoverability and reduced backup windows.
  • High Availability: Architected AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AOAG) for critical systems, ensuring near-zero downtime during maintenance.
  • Team Scaling: Coordinated remote contractors and junior staff, establishing SQL best practices and scaling output without adding headcount.

Database Administrator

EF Education First

Sep 2019 – Aug 2020

  • Release Automation: Modernized the database release cycle by implementing Redgate tooling to automate schema synchronization, eliminating error-prone manual script execution and accelerating deployment times.
  • Backup Optimization: Re-architected the SQL backup strategy to leverage direct writes to S3, enhancing resiliency and removing on-premise capacity bottlenecks. Implemented S3 lifecycle policies to automate archival and control long-term storage growth.
  • Operational Stability: Stabilized a volatile production environment by implementing routine operational hygiene, monitoring, and reporting which reduced recurring incidents by half.
  • Standards & Process: Defined organization-wide SQL coding standards and deployment checklists, establishing a baseline for consistent database quality and reducing code defects.

Data Engineer

EF Education First

Sep 2017 – Sep 2019

  • ETL Development: Designed and deployed robust SSIS ETL pipelines to ingest high-volume transactional data into the enterprise data warehouse, enabling daily reporting for executive leadership.
  • Power Platform Administration: Administered the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem, overseeing capacity planning, licensing governance, and infrastructure stability to support scaling business requirements.
  • BI Infrastructure: Administered the Power BI Service tenant, managing gateways, data refresh schedules, and row-level security (RLS) to ensure secure delivery of business intelligence.
  • Data Quality: Implemented automated data quality checks within ETL workflows, reducing reporting errors by detecting schema drift and data anomalies before they reached downstream analysts.

Data Warehouse Engineer

Arcadia Healthcare

Jan 2015 – Sep 2017

  • Scalable Data Platforms: Designed and developed scalable features for high-volume healthcare data platforms using Agile methodologies, directly contributing to the product roadmap.
  • Performance Tuning: Created and optimized complex stored procedures and SQL queries to process millions of patient records, significantly improving data retrieval speeds and system reliability.
  • Test Automation: Improved infrastructure by implementing automation for regression testing and static code analysis, reducing production defects and accelerating release cycles.
  • Code Governance: Championed code quality through daily code reviews and the standardization of development workflows, fostering a culture of technical excellence.

Early Career

2011 – 2015

  • Software Developer

    Lever Corps2014 – 2015

    Researched and implemented wayfinding technology to quantify cultural relationships in Northern Berkshire County, bridging software development with community data analysis.

  • Information Technology Analyst

    Crane & Co.2012 – 2014

    Kept the servers running and helped people when their computers broke. Classic IT support role.

  • Co-founder & Lead Web Developer

    Keeping You Sane2011 – 2014

    Started a web dev shop with a friend. Built e-commerce sites, managed clients, learned how to run a small business.

What I Work With

The stuff I actually use day-to-day.

Cloud Architecture

AWS Control Tower Multi-Account Landing Zones Serverless (Lambda/API GW) ECS/ECR Containers Multi-Cloud (Azure/GCP)

Automation & IDP

Terraform (Expert) AWS CDK GitHub Actions CI/CD "Golden Path" Templates Self-Service Platforms

Data Modernization

Performance Tuning RDS MongoDB Atlas Snowflake DocumentDB

Security & Governance

Wiz (CSPM) IAM Policy as Code GDPR & PCI Scope Scalr Governance Secure by Default

Network & Reliability

Cloudflare/Route53 VPC Peering Aviatrix VPN DR Strategy Air Gapped Backups

Strategic FinOps

Flexible Cost Savings Commitments Spend Forecasting Vendor Rationalization Resource Rightsizing AWS Marketplace Techie Award: Cloud Spend

Service Operations

Jira Service Mgmt (JSM) Atlassian / Confluence GitHub Actions ECS/ECR CloudWatch & Site24x7 Operations Playbooks (AWS SSM)

Technical Leadership

Global Team Mgmt (4 TZ) Agile Transformation Contract Negotiation Hiring & Growth Cross-Functional Strategy Techie Award: Coaching

Languages

Python PowerShell T-SQL (Expert) HCL Bash/Shell

How I Work

My Playbook

Not buzzwords—these are the things I reference in my day-to-day when making decisions or explaining tradeoffs.

MEASURING WHAT MATTERS

DORA Metrics

When someone asks "how's the team doing?" I pull up deployment frequency, lead time, and incident recovery. Beats opinions.

CLOUD COSTS

FinOps

I run cost reviews, build dashboards, and help teams understand their AWS bill. Got nominated 6 times for this stuff—finally won one. My Leo moment. 🏆

ARCHITECTURE REVIEWS

Well-Architected Reviews

Before any big project goes live, I walk through AWS's checklist. Mostly focused on cost and ops—security has its own review.

  • In practice: Catches things like missing autoscaling or expensive storage tiers before they become problems.
  • Read more: AWS Well-Architected Framework

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

Golden Paths

I build the "default way" to do things—templates, pipelines, and docs—so teams don't have to reinvent the wheel.

TEAM STRUCTURE

Platform Team Model

My team doesn't gatekeep—we build tools, set guardrails, and coach. Teams come to us for help, not permission.

Education

Bachelor of Science

Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Double Major: CS & Business Admin | Minor: Info Systems

2015

Information Technology

McCann Technical High School

2 Years Specialized Vocational Training

North Adams, MA | 2009

Recognition

  • Techie Award: Cloud Spending

    EF Education First

    2025 Winner

  • Techie Award: Coach of the Year

    EF Education First

    2022 Winner

  • Cost Conscious Nominee (6x)

    EF Education First

    2018 - 2025

  • Rookie of the Year

    Arcadia Healthcare Solutions

    2016

Running a business, not
an IT department?

I help owners who are tired of chasing passwords, broken reports, and surprise bills. Think of it as a calm, technical co-pilot you can borrow when things feel messy.

  • Sort out email, domains, and who actually owns what.
  • Be the web person for sites, DNS, and basic hosting choices.
  • Handle on-prem headaches: printers, Wi-Fi, switches, small servers and backups.