Software engineer pivoting to urban mobility research and policy.
Thirteen years building backend systems — at Heroku, Capital One, and Braintree — taught me a lot about how complex institutions move (and resist moving). It turns out that's useful preparation for studying transit. In September I'm starting the EIT Urban Mobility Master's program, first at Técnico Lisboa, then at UPC BarcelonaTech, focusing on policy, governance, and the connective tissue between land use, infrastructure, and the institutions that decide which interventions ever make it onto the table.
I grew up outside Detroit, where cars were infrastructure and an absence of options was the worst kind of option — chosen on your behalf. At twenty-three I moved to Chicago, sold my car, and realized that what I'd been told was freedom was actually a constraint. That inversion never stopped being interesting. I'm writing about it at The Urbanist Lexicon.
A directory of urban advocacy groups across the US and Canada, searchable by zip or postal code. The idea: when someone moves to a new city — or wakes up angry about a dangerous intersection three blocks from home that nobody has ever fixed — they should be able to find the people already organizing for better streets and better transit nearby. In under a minute.
Built as a Go API (chi, deployed to Fly.io) + React/Vite SPA (Cloudflare Workers + Static Assets). Curated by hand — every listing is reviewed against published criteria, not picked by an algorithm. Open source, open-licensed dataset (ODbL), public submission process. → GitHub
- Heroku (Salesforce) · Senior Software Engineer · 2021–2026 — credential and authorization management; service layer for a data synchronization platform
- Capital One · Senior Software Engineer · 2019–2021 — internal underwriting and portfolio tooling for Commercial Banking
- Braintree · Software Engineer · 2016–2019 — payment processing; internal engineering conference for ~200 people; apprenticeship mentoring
- Clarity Consulting · 2013–2016 — contact-center product on Microsoft Skype for Business
Go · Ruby · Java · Python · SQL