I turn AI from a cost center into a technical moat.

I’m currently CTO at Alterion, a seed-stage AI security startup, where I’m the first technical hire and sole engineering leader reporting directly to the founders. In my first six months I ran the full 30/60/90-day mandate: audited the codebase and AWS footprint with Snyk, SonarQube, and Trivy; replaced an all-manual deploy process with a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline; instrumented DORA metrics as the team’s first quantified velocity baseline with Datadog dashboards behind it; and ran build-vs-buy-vs-fine-tune evaluations across the AI use cases central to the product, shipping a demo-ready prototype used in investor conversations ahead of the company’s Series A. On the governance side, I deployed [Vanta / Drata / Secureframe] for the company’s first SOC 2 gap analysis, authored its first security and operational policy set, and built the technical hiring function from zero — role scorecards, a structured interview loop, and the company’s first engineering offer inside 60 days.

Before Alterion, I spent three years as VP of Product Experience & AI at Splunk (post-Cisco acquisition), where I architected a Tier-1 development partnership with OpenAI to co-develop the Codex model and deployed five Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that became the data-connectivity layer behind the platform’s premium AI subscription tiers. I also led the AI-native Figma plugin suite that collapsed the design-to-development bottleneck and cut feature time-to-market by 40%, and shipped a run of agentic AI products — troubleshooting agents, agent monitoring, a triage agent, and AI playbook authoring — across the Splunk Observability line.

Before that, I was VP of Engineering at Workday for four years, leading a global organization of 150+ people across engineering, product management, and customer experience, with full ownership of 27 customer-facing and internal applications. I architected a digital self-service strategy that cut support case volume enough to save $8M a year in operating costs, shipped an AI chatbot that handled 40% of first-touch customer inquiries, and pushed the team’s CI/CD and agile practices to 50+ releases a week while running a 24x7 follow-the-sun operation across the US, Ireland, and India.

What ties those three roles together is the same instinct: I don’t just define a roadmap, I build the engineering and product culture that turns rapid innovation into something a board can rely on. That means AI-native architecture instead of AI bolted on after the fact, governance and ethical review built into the delivery pipeline rather than added afterward, and enough hands-on technical depth to still write the hard code myself when a team needs it.