From habitat restoration to production AI
I am an applied AI engineer. I learn how a system behaves, whether it is a watershed, a song or a language model, and build tools that work with it.
Where I started
My first career was outdoors. With the Washington Conservation Corps I helped lead a backcountry crew restoring riparian zones and wetlands, building trails and responding to floods and wildfires. At Apricot Lane Farms, a regenerative biodynamic farm in California, I ran habitat restoration projects, managed irrigation and trained new workers and volunteers. Over those years I planted more than 250,000 trees.
Living systems taught me most of what I believe about engineering. Nothing works in isolation, small feedback loops matter more than big plans, and you leave a place healthier than you found it.
Workshop and studio
I built heirloom furniture from blueprints at Geek Chic, then studied audio production and wrote, recorded and mastered more than 300 commissioned songs for Songfinch, each delivered in four days. I still think of shipping software the way I thought about a commission: a real person is waiting, the deadline is real and the craft has to hold up.
Models and systems
I moved into AI by training it: a year of human-feedback work on frontier language models at Invisible Technologies, and open models of my own on Hugging Face that have been downloaded 188,000 times. At Doner and Yamamoto I built the automation behind campaigns for ACE Hardware, Stellantis, Tylenol and Rush Street Interactive. At Adobe I work with enterprise customers like Baptist Health, Logitech, Delaware North and Fanatics to put Firefly, AEM and GenStudio into production, and with Adobe’s own product teams to turn what we learn in the field into internal tools, demos and product changes.
What I am looking for
Applied AI work where the problem lives in the real world. I am most drawn to climate, agriculture and conservation technology and to creative and audio tools, and glad to work anywhere a hard problem needs someone who learns the domain quickly and ships. My corporate work taught me how to deliver inside large organizations. My field and studio work is why I care what gets delivered.
Education
- BS, Computer and Information Sciences
- BS, Audio Production
- AAS, Natural Sciences and Computer Technology
- Certificate, Machine Learning and Data Science
- Certificate, Prompt Engineering
- Pro Tools User Certification