I’ve been the rover — the engineer leadership hands the hardest project on the team, with cover to work outside the ceremony. Cigna, Express Scripts, Anywhere Real Estate. The build lands in the team’s own stack, and the team runs it after I leave.
Career
- Serve Virtual Enterprises. I was on the account-management APIs behind every card swipe, then on the monitoring team. One .NET attribute traced every function and another cached it, at hundreds of millions of calls a day.
- Express Scripts. No deployment pipeline at all: four of us built the custom Jenkins that replaced the release team’s runbooks. I argued for Kubernetes, lost to a vendor pitch, and built the on-ramp to the platform anyway.
- TGI. A Toronto startup — the one stop on this list with nothing written up yet.
- Cigna. The rover: leadership hands me the hardest project on whichever team is stuck. A PCF-to-AWS migration and the path to prod under it, a two-week prototype that got a two-year design effort staffed, and a forked query editor that ended a $700k-a-year renewal.
I work as a peer. I will tell you in about a day if I’m the wrong person. The intro is fit, not a free architecture review. I don’t hand the work to a junior bench, and I don’t sell Well-Architected as the product.
I refuse “certify the team” and work I will not own in production. If you need a certificate wall to trust me, I’m not your hire. The catalog is the résumé: what was on fire, what we decided, what I would not do again.
Mentorship is not a playbook I laminate. Tried-and-true keeps the pager quiet. Teaching is when to break the playbook and prove it with instrumentation. New hires get permission from standing teams, fail-fast, and numbers.
Project funding costs talent. When the cycle shuts a team down, the engineers who can leave go first, and what’s left is whoever learned the politics. I’d rather work with a standing team that pivots from one problem to the next and keeps the tribal knowledge in-house — that’s what a fractional principal is for.
I work US-based, remote-first, and travel when the work needs a room. Engagements run through UCBY Holdings LLC.