Senior Engineer & Former Legal Aid Lawyer
I've spent two careers designing, building, and improving systems that help people get to
better outcomes. The first was a decade in legal services and access to justice:
representing families in housing, benefits, and custody cases, designing a volunteer lawyer
program that served over 20,000 defendants in consumer debt court, and coordinating
development of Pro Bono Net's FEMA Appeals document assembly tool. The second was eight
years of engineering at Rakuten Advertising, from junior engineer to leading a squad, most
recently building two AI agents used in production, including one that investigates
incidents and recommends a fix it has no permission to apply.
Technical Skills
Production experience:
Python, Go, Vertex AI / Gemini, Google ADK, Model Armor, Kubernetes (GKE), GCP, Workload
Identity (GKE), Kong, Keycloak, HashiCorp Vault, CI/CD, Docker, Postgres, React,
TypeScript, JavaScript, Node, PHP, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana, Pub/Sub, Redis, SQL, Linux,
Terraform, Ansible, SonarQube, Wiz, Chainguard
Practices:
AI-assisted development, enterprise AI agent governance, blue-green deployments, Agile
Languages:
Spanish (fully proficient)
Experience
Rakuten Advertising
— New York, NY & Remote
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Built Target Platform Buddy, the first production AI agent on our governed GCP agent platform: TechOps hands it an alert or incident, and it investigates across curated cluster docs, logs, and read-only Kubernetes access, then recommends a fix. It cannot change anything, by design — it runs under a least-privilege, read-only role behind Model Armor gateways (Python, Google ADK, Vertex/Gemini)
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Designed (including the UI), built, and shipped an AI chat agent that turns plain-English questions into Prometheus/Grafana queries — finding a number went from minutes, sometimes hours, of writing queries by hand to seconds
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Designed and built a blue-green deployment strategy using Kubernetes HTTPRoute weights, to take deploy-window downtime to zero and replace a fragile rollback procedure
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Led a squad of 4 engineers owning a dozen customer-facing and backend services in Go, React, TypeScript, and PHP; cut ticket resolution time by 50% in the first year through process changes and clearer technical direction
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Shaped the squad's patterns for authentication and secrets (Kong/OIDC, Keycloak, Vault) and shepherded their rollout across those dozen services
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Replaced big, batched releases with small incremental deploys: built and overhauled ~15 pipelines with automated test, quality, and security gates — 30% faster deploy cycle and 16% fewer bugs filed
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Migrated ~10 production services from one-service-per-VM hosting to GKE, owning each migration end to end
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Managed two full-time interns directly for about seven months, from a standing start in React Native and Go to a mobile app on the App Store and Google Play; guided them through a sign-in design (PKCE, refresh tokens in encrypted device storage) and won agreement for it from the identity team, CISO, and Security Director
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Decomposed a PHP monolith into 5+ distributed services, giving customers a faster, more modern experience and developers a clearer, more flexible, and more resilient design
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Built React front ends and the APIs behind them for seven years on my team's customer-facing advertiser dashboard, a full-stack product made up of microservices handling millions of requests a day
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Executed a complete CSS overhaul of a primary customer-facing dashboard, improving usability and visual consistency
Center for Justice Innovation
— New York, NY
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Provided technical assistance to about 10 jurisdictions — MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge sites and state court systems — working to reduce jail populations and adopt new technology; translated the research team's findings into practice and policy
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Directed programs for the nation's first community court with a $2.3 million annual budget and a 15-person multidisciplinary team of social workers, clinicians, researchers, and intake staff
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Served as primary liaison between judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and legal aid organizations, building consensus around innovative approaches
Pro Bono Net (now Scale Justice)
— New York, NY
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Coordinated development of the FEMA Appeals generator, a document assembly tool created for Superstorm Sandy response and used by disaster victims nationwide
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Managed technology projects serving more than 80,000 users at a nonprofit expanding access to justice
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Coordinated city- and statewide volunteer attorney programs; maintained and sourced online resources for pro bono lawyers handling benefits and other cases, working with dozens of legal services organizations nationwide
New York Appleseed
— New York, NY
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Designed a volunteer lawyer program from scratch — how clients were found, how the court day ran, and the procedure training — that served over 20,000 defendants in consumer debt cases
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Pioneered a limited-scope engagement model; trained hundreds of volunteer lawyers and law students across multiple court locations and supervised them in court
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Ran the program in partnership with the New York State Access to Justice program, an arm of the state courts, working with its senior leadership to expand and institutionalize the model
The Family Center
— New York, NY
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Represented families facing terminal illness in housing, benefits, custody, and guardianship proceedings, including clients who spoke only Spanish
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Advocated for clients on public benefits, Social Security Disability, and public housing eligibility; conducted "know your rights" clinics
Education
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University — J.D., cum laude
University of Tulsa — B.A., summa cum laude, Spanish