About
About me
in about 325 words
I build software at the intersection of applied AI and financial infrastructure. I'm Director of Engineering at Fundrise, where I lead the engineering behind our AI-enabled products — including RealAI — and still contribute daily. I've been here since 2019, working with the team to build a better financial system for the individual.
Most of my work has been zero-to-one: taking a concept through prototype to a production system people depend on. RealAI is the current one; before it, Equitize, a private-securities platform providing secondary market liquidity. Underneath both is a decade of experience in payments, KYC, and settlement infrastructure in highly regulated domains.
The pattern is usually the same: talk through the idea with the people who want it, build a proof of concept quickly enough that we can argue with something tangible, then take the parts that survive into production and own them once they're carrying live traffic and real money.
That infrastructure work spans a decade in regulated domains: ACH processing handling $1B+ a year, a Stripe debit funding integration, KYC and investment approval workflows, share issuance and reconciliation, and insurance rating. That background is why I'm careful about evaluation and failure modes in AI systems. When you've shipped software that moves other people's money, “it mostly works” is not a finished sentence.
I contribute to open source where the work overlaps with what I'm building. Most recently that's been Spring AI’s Anthropic integration — tool_choice support for Claude function calling, and per-message TTL and cache-block controls for prompt caching, both merged into the framework.
Before Fundrise I spent three years at Travelers working on proprietary software, rating systems, and machine learning pipelines. I have an M.S. in Computer Science from Towson University and a B.S. in Information Systems from the University of Maryland.
Outside of work I'm an avid podcast listener — Acquired, Invest Like the Best, and Onward — and I listen to a lot of Marsh, Above & Beyond, and Enamour while I write code.