Lead Software Engineer

MeetCritique is a gymnastics video review platform that gives gymnasts the opportunity to receive feedback from nationally-accredited judges in a virtual space. Gymnasts upload their routine, a judge reviews it, leaves timestamped annotations and overall notes. The gymnast then takes that feedback and improves their performance.

I developed the original concept with the domain owner. I built, deployed, and maintained the service as the sole developer. Work includes a custom-tailored WordPress theme and plugins that drive the core business needs for customers, judges, and admin users.

- MeetCritique has serviced over 24,000 gymnastics session reviews since its creation. Revenue has grown steeply year-over-year since its first sales in 2022.
- Architected and built the media pipeline. Customers upload their video routines to the site, which goes to AWS MediaConvert for compression, originals are kept for only a short time, and total server costs are kept low.
- Built the routine upload and judge queue system. Includes priority queue mechanisms for premium and subscription customers. Email alert systems keep judges and customers informed every step of the way.
- Supports many forms of payment and refund/dispute mechanisms via standard payment gateways.

Led engineering on two platforms: PushNetwork and Aimtell in 2022-2025.

- Owned PushNetwork, an ad delivery platform that utilized predictive analytics to improve ad content performance for clients. At peak, the service delivered over half a billion impressions daily, across a network of advertisers and hundreds of client accounts.
- Cut a high-value Kinesis Firehose bill by roughly one-third by tracing cost to payload volume, and using gzip compression to reduce payloads before flight.
- Improved brand safety by developing a client-facing keyword suppression system for ad content served by PushNetwork. Improved brand safety response time from 75 minutes to 5 minutes after configuration updates.
- Tech lead for three developers. Duties performed: daily standups, technical unblocking, and delegating requirements between business leadership, dev/analytics/production teams.

Then in 2025-2026 I transferred to DMS's lead-marketplace team, which provides services to national insurance carriers.

- Modernized the tech stack: PHP 7 to 8.1, Symfony 2.7 to 6.4. This was five major framework upgrades on the platform. Each hop was gated on green test suites, and updated as necessary.
- Cleared critical and high security findings from scheduled security audits. Added Docker container scanning to the release pipeline.
- Retired a legacy lead delivery platform and replaced it with a channel router. Mapped more than a dozen CRM integrations across twice as many vendor configurations. Proved cutovers each step of the way. Maintained legacy vs new parity for request payloads that flowed through the system. Updated logging system to reduce time taken for debugging tasks.
- After seeing success, I ran the same migration on a second marketplace. The second migration was completed in days rather than weeks.

Joined through DMS's acquisition of PushPros, Aimtell, Aramis Interactive. Continued to run the push and ad delivery platforms. Expanded push notification usage for DMS-owned properties plus external partners.

- Grew ad delivery roughly 10x (from tens of millions of impressions daily to hundreds of millions). No interruption to partner revenue.
- Increased ad content fill rate by improving the retry system, adjusting the cap system on a per-advertiser-source basis, adding greylist features, building per-property/per-end-user filtering mechanisms.
- Fixed intermittent database failures by: randomizing per-instance cron offsets, offloading data to pre-parsed S3 objects that update on different schedules based on data freshness demand.
- Built and maintained data aggregation pipeline behind PushNetwork's reporting across MySQL, Redshift, and stored procedures.

Primary architect of PushPros platforms. Translated company leadership's business goals to technological solutions.

- Built and launched PushProsRev (2018). A client-facing revenue dashboard. Housed hundreds of client accounts and well over a thousand managed properties over the course of its lifecycle. Application tracked hourly/daily aggregate metrics (subscribers, impressions, clicks, revenue, ctr, erpm) for clients, properties, and advertising partners. Technologies: Node.js, Express, Socket.io, Pug, MySQL, AWS.
- Built GetPush. A serverless service design to provide custom service workers for clients to install on their websites using a single script with easy-to-follow instructions. Technologies: API Gateway, Lambda, RDS.
- Built the Blueprint. A platform-wide ad campaign management system. Streamlined campaign configuration and automated campaign updates across the entire network. One-click features could deploy hundreds of campaigns across properties, or swap entire campaign templates based on client needs. Top partners earned five- and six-figure monthly revenue. Technologies: Node.js, Socket.io, Pug, MySQL.
- Built and launched PushNetwork (2020). An on-demand delivery service that aggregated content from multiple advertisers to maximize revenue based on geo, site id, and other factors. Tens of millions of impressions per day within months of launch, hundreds of millions of impressions per day within two years. Developed a robust predictive analytics scoring algorithm that continuously responded to per-property analytics. API was served using a low-cost auto-scaling fleet of 20-200 EC2 instances behind a load balancer. Technologies: Node.js, MySQL, S3, AWS.
- Owned security, backup, and disaster recovery for the PushPros services.
- Led and grew a team of 6 developers. Interviewed technical hires. Standardized and enforced developer workflows with Bitbucket.

Migrated Aramis's lead-generation properties off a sprawl of hosted servers onto a consistent AWS solution. This streamlined the scaling process while reducing server costs.

Worked with in-house PushPros team to standardize and build a push notification integration system for all of Aramis's web properties.

Eventually moved to PushPros full-time once the AWS migration work was finished.

Designed, developed, and provided art direction for web and mobile e-learning applications. Work included responsive design, Section 508 accessibility, LMS-compliant delivery. Used JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Node.js, MSSQL.

Worked with clients to consult on appropriate technologies to accomplish specific goals. My involvement was end to end: conceptualization, planning, development, testing, and ongoing maintenance.

Led teams of developers and designers, coordinating tasks, keeping clients informed as projects moved.

Clients included:
- Health care industry: Bayer, Novo Nordisk, Sunovion, Deloitte.
- Technical industry: The Aerospace Corporation, Lockheed Martin.
- Transportation/govt industry: the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.