About
I rebuild the platforms that have become the bottleneck.
Cloud & Platform Leadership
Most of my career has been the same job in different clothes: walking into a company whose platform has quietly become the thing holding it back, and rebuilding it. The architecture, the team, and — usually the actual blocker — who owns what when it breaks.
I did it at Ellie Mae, where the platform carried the company through hyper-growth to the #1 US loan origination system and into an $11B acquisition. I did it at Cheetah Digital, where a legacy product was eating the innovation budget until we sunset it and rebuilt loyalty on an event-driven platform — work that contributed to the exit. I did it at BlackLine, where the job was getting 150 engineers across 15+ product teams to stop handing work over a wall and start running what they built.
The part people consistently underestimate is that this is a people problem wearing a technology costume. Anyone can draw the target architecture. Getting an organization to want it is the work.
These days the transformation question has a new shape. AI is not a feature you bolt onto a roadmap — it is a capability you either govern and ship, or a demo that embarrasses you the first time a regulated customer asks how it works. Doing that well is what I am focused on now.
In August 2026 I joined ACI Worldwide as SVP, Cloud Operations, leading the global cloud behind their banking, biller, and merchant businesses.
What pulled me into mortgage technology at Ellie Mae wasn't really the software — it was what sat on the other side of it. People buying a house. Payments has that same quality, and it shows up far more often. Paying a bill, buying groceries, a paycheck landing, money moving between banks — it runs underneath ordinary life for most people, and it only gets noticed when it doesn't work.
The Cloud Pod
I co-founded and host The Cloud Pod, a weekly podcast about cloud architecture, AI, and the economics of running infrastructure at scale — running since December 2018, past 370 episodes.
It is the most useful thing I do that isn't my day job. Covering AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Kubernetes every week gives me a reading on where the platforms are heading roughly twelve to eighteen months before it shows up in a vendor pitch, which turns out to be genuinely useful when you're the one signing the contract.
When we hit episode 25 I wrote up the story behind the show — A reflection on 25 episodes!
Host & Co-FounderSince Dec 2018
Weekly episodes370+
TopicsAWS · GCP · Azure · Kubernetes · AI
What that's produced
- $25M+ new ARR via platform + AI investments
- 2 successful exits via cloud modernization & scale
- Engagement: low 60s → mid-80s; below-average turnover
- 3 orgs transformed to product-aligned ownership
- Reduced enterprise risk while increasing releases 10x
How I work
Product & Platform Architecture
Monolith → event-driven microservices. API-first (OpenAPI). Petabyte-scale data platforms. Architecture driving adoption and retention.
Developer Experience & Velocity
DORA metrics with board-level reporting. Onboarding: 2 weeks → 1 day. Releases up 10x. Self-service PaaS.
AI Strategy & Governance
LLM-powered features driving customer time savings. AI ops reducing ticket volume 50%. AI governance under an ISO 42001-certified management system.
Security & Compliance as Market Openers
FedRAMP Moderate and DoD IL2 → US Gov. KSA SCC → Middle East. SOC 1/2, ISO 27001/42001, PCI, HIPAA.
Technology Aligned to Business Outcomes
Platform bets tied to revenue and margin rather than to fashion. $70M budget ownership, board-level KPI reporting, and roadmap tradeoffs made explicit to finance — including the ones that cost this quarter.
Doing What’s Right for the Business
Extended a GCP migration 12 months to protect financial statements and customer trust. Sunset a product that was consuming the innovation budget. The right call and the popular call are frequently not the same call.
Where I've been
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Aug 2026 – Present
ACI Worldwide Nasdaq: ACIW
SVP, Cloud Operations
Global payments technology company. Leads the global cloud supporting ACI’s banking, biller, and merchant businesses.
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2021 – Jul 2026
BlackLine Nasdaq: BL
SVP Cloud Engineering & Operations
$1B+ revenue financial close platform. Report to CTO. 150+ engineers globally, $70M budget. Executive sponsor on strategic accounts.
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2021 (through acquisition)
Cheetah Digital
SVP of Engineering & Support
Marketing & loyalty SaaS. Acquired by CM Group. Report to CPO. $57M budget. Board presentations and M&A diligence.
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2016 – 2021
Ellie Mae NYSE: ELLI → Thoma Bravo → ICE, $11B
VP of Cloud Platform Engineering
Mortgage platform processing 55% of US mortgages. Promoted from Sr. Director. Hosted CTO Advisory Board. M&A due diligence.
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2013 – 2016
Mobiquity
Senior Director of Operations & Support
Mobile solutions provider. Built the entire support/DevOps organization from scratch, then scaled it for several years. Owned the security function.
Earlier
- BMC Software (Nasdaq: BMC, later taken private) — Sr. Director, Infrastructure & Security
- Moxie Software — Director
- SunTotal Systems (Nasdaq: SUMT, later taken private) — Director; led the company’s first SaaS transformation, 400+ customers, 7M users
Off the clock
Seattle Seahawks
Avid fan, which in the NFC West builds character and occasionally ruins a Sunday.
Movies
A lifelong habit I have no intention of breaking.
Dystopian fiction
Given how much of my career has been about predicting what a platform does under stress, maybe not a coincidence.
Advisory & boards
Customer Advisory Boards Former member
StrongDM · New Relic · Google Cloud Infrastructure · Palo Alto Networks
Say hello
I'm always up for a conversation about platform strategy, AI governance, a podcast guest pitch, or a book recommendation.