I build and write about distributed systems.
Staff Software Engineer on Cloud Spanner at Google. Before that, AutoFDO and fleet-wide profiling, and the MATLAB JIT compiler at MathWorks.
Systems I’ve worked on
Writing
Selected articles
Districted: Ground floor
Building a city simulation: specified below ground, seen above it
Spanner: Removing cumulative mutation limits for DML transactions
How Spanner removed the 80,000-mutation transaction-level limit for DML, so applications can run multiple DML statements in one transaction without artificial splits.
Introducing Cassandra-compatible API in Cloud Spanner
Announcing the Cassandra-compatible API for Cloud Spanner, enabling applications built for Cassandra to run on Spanner’s globally distributed architecture.
Cloud Spanner doubles the number of updates per transaction
An engineering deep dive into improvements that doubled the number of updates allowed per transaction in Cloud Spanner.
Google work
Cloud Spanner work across leadership and engineering
Deep technical work in databases and distributed systems
Worked deeply on Cloud Spanner problems spanning scalability, distributed resource management, customer-facing architecture, and database infrastructure.
- Designed distributed rate capping and token-bucket-based resource management in Cloud Spanner at very large scale.
- Led technical direction for Cassandra compatibility work in Spanner.
- Unblocked scalability bottlenecks in large Spanner regions and improved system behavior at scale.
Leadership, execution, and cross-functional delivery
Led teams across key Cloud Spanner initiatives, helping move projects from early concept through execution and delivery.
- Worked with Directors, UTLs, PMs, and senior engineering leadership to align priorities and execution.
- Led teams spanning engineers and technical leads across customer migrations and product efforts.
- Drove ambiguous, cross-functional efforts to completion through alignment, communication, and conflict resolution.
Home work
Projects I’ve been building outside work
News Aggregation Platform
A self-hosted system for ingesting, clustering, and organizing news stories, with room for summarization, ranking, and timeline intelligence.
Home Assistant Infrastructure
A personal automation stack spanning Home Assistant, local integrations, remote access, storage, and self-hosted services.
OpenClaw Experiments
Exploring agent orchestration, workflow systems, and practical patterns for tool-using AI systems.