About Me
A self-taught engineer with a non-traditional path from sales and marketing to building AI-powered platforms serving enterprise clients.
The Journey
Started as a Cause Marketing & Customer Loyalty Solutions Specialist, learning the fundamentals of customer experience and business strategy.
Authored a chapter in "Going Up: Proven Strategies for Reaching Higher Levels in Business" on cause marketing implementation.
Worked as Regional Sales Manager at Mainstream Merchant Services, where I began exploring web development and marketing automation.
Founded RipeMetrics and graduated from the CSD16 accelerator program, a venture capital-backed program for early-stage software companies.
Taught myself to code out of necessity while building the product from scratch. Started with basic web development and progressively learned React, TypeScript, and full-stack development.
Led product development, managed diverse teams, and shaped company vision while learning software engineering in real-time.
Led complete technical refactor from Laravel Livewire to React/Next.js, reducing network response times by 6 seconds and improving overall system performance.
Built AI-powered chatbot with OpenAI, MySQL, and vector databases (Pinecone/Chroma). Created website content extraction system reducing client onboarding from 20 minutes to 2 minutes.
Scaled platform to 50+ enterprise clients processing thousands of customer interactions daily, while maintaining 95%+ system uptime.
Completed AI Engineering Bootcamp (Maven) and LLM Engineering course (AI Makerspace), diving deep into transformer architectures, fine-tuning, and RAG systems.
Currently exploring Model Context Protocol (MCP) UI development through Kent C. Dodds' intensive course - building hybrid interfaces where conversation meets traditional UI.
Excited about being early to this technology, similar to the early days of React or mobile-first design. Building at the intersection of AI and user experience.
Education & Continuous Learning
UC San Diego Extended Studies
Sep 2018 - Jan 2019
Customer Experience Leadership Course - Explored strategic importance of CX, evaluation methods, and best practices from industry leaders like Apple, Amazon, and Tesla.
Stanford University Online
Oct 2016 - Jan 2017
Technology Entrepreneurship - Studied entrepreneurship process for high-impact enterprises, team formation, and Silicon Valley startup ecosystem.
Master the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Kent C. Dodds - Sept 2025
Intensive 2-week cohort on MCP fundamentals, advanced features, UI development, and OAuth 2.1 authorization for AI-native applications.
AI Engineering Bootcamp
Maven - Mar 2025
10-week intensive bootcamp on building production-ready AI agent applications, including RAG, fine-tuning, and multi-agent systems.
LLM Engineering - Foundations to SLMs
AI Makerspace - Nov 2024
6-week course on transformer architectures, fine-tuning techniques (LoRA, QLoRA), model alignment (DPO, RLHF), and SLM optimization.
AI-powered Sanity Development
Sanity - Mar 2025
Advanced Sanity CMS development with AI integration for content management systems.
What Makes Me Different
Technologies I Work With
Frontend
Backend & Database
AI & ML
CMS & Tools
DevOps & Testing
Emerging Tech
Beyond Code
When I'm not building the future of AI interfaces, you'll find me rock climbing around San Diego or hunting for rare vinyl records. I believe the best engineers are well-rounded people who bring diverse perspectives to their work. My non-traditional path into tech has taught me that there's no single "right way" to become a great engineer - curiosity, persistence, and a willingness to learn are what matter most.