Leadership and Executive Experience

2023 to Present · Salinas, CA (Remote)

Founder and Principal

1023AI

Established 1023AI to provide AI safety and alignment leadership to organizations where capable AI is scaling beyond what standard governance was built to handle. The consultancy formalizes two decades of technical and institutional leadership into a focused practice: building the governance architectures that determine whether AI safety survives contact with operational reality. Available for fractional, remote, and in-house executive engagements.

2015 to 2025 · Salinas, CA

President and Executive Director

California Technology Nonprofit (Digital Equity and Literacy)

Led a California technology nonprofit through a decade of sustained growth, increasing annual revenue from approximately $150,000 to more than $500,000. Programs focused on closing social and economic opportunity gaps by providing hardware, software, and technology skills to individuals, families, schools, libraries, and community organizations across the Monterey Bay region. Responsible for strategic planning, board governance, fundraising, grant writing and administration, partnership development, and executive team leadership. Directed the organization's full rebrand, facility expansion into a 5,500 square foot operations and teaching space, and executive leadership transition from founder to professional management.

2011 to 2015 · Monterey, CA

Senior Manager and Senior Analyst

Northrop Grumman / Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC)

Senior operational and technical leadership on Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs programs with total funding exceeding $60 billion. The work during this period was a direct application of complex adaptive systems principles to the design and architecture of large-scale federal systems, translating the theoretical and simulation-based research developed at NPS into production infrastructure serving the full scope of the US defense and health enterprise.

Key programs spanned the full range of DoD and VA enterprise priorities. The Global Force Management (GFM) system and GFM Data Initiative (GFM-DI) are DoD enterprise systems responsible for tracking, allocating, and managing US military forces globally, a genuinely complex adaptive system with thousands of interdependent entities and emergent force posture outcomes that no single component produces alone. The DoD and VA Electronic Health Record modernization programs addressed the intersection of technical architecture and human systems: how health information is structured, stored, and retrieved across multiple agencies and platforms, with compliance and security infrastructure operating under HIPAA, DISA protocols, FAR, DFAR, and DoDAF. Additional programs covered enterprise identity, access management, and access control systems; cloud migration to AWS and Azure; Service-Oriented Architectures and microservices; and decision-support systems serving senior military and civilian leadership.

Architectural decisions across all programs were grounded in complex systems thinking: designing for modularity over tight coupling, building for unexpected interaction dynamics rather than anticipated ones, and treating the human systems operating around the technical systems as core architectural variables. Directed the transition of major federal programs from legacy relational database structures to document-oriented and flat-file systems including MongoDB, a shift grounded in an understanding of how complex, nonrelational data relationships behave under scale and operational stress. Championed the adoption of vetted open-source solutions across programs, reducing vendor lock-in and increasing architectural flexibility in environments with long operational lifespans. Worked directly with lead developers, database architects, data modeling and data provenance teams, and QA leads on all aspects of technical design and iteration. Led development teams working in Java, HTML, C++, JavaScript, PHP, Oracle Database and SQL Developer, MySQL, and MongoDB. Served as primary operational and technical point of contact for federal and state government agency directors, C-level officers at nonprofit and commercial organizations, and multiple working and advisory boards. Worked directly with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Joint Chiefs of Staff.

2008 to 2011 · Monterey, CA

DoD Civilian Program Leader and Principal Investigator

Naval Postgraduate School, MOVES Institute

Department of Defense civilian program leader responsible for a portfolio of defense technology, modeling and simulation, collaboration platform, and decision-support programs with more than $9.8 million ⓘ in fully funded federal proposals across six programs, every proposal funded at the amount requested. More than doubled the R&D program budget in the MOVES Institute following first-year delivery. Received the National Security Institute (NSI) Scholar Fellowship Award as the sole recipient in 2008. Received an Official Letter of Commendation from the United States Assistant Secretary of Defense, Michael G. Vickers, for program leadership described as “a ground-breaking tool that will benefit the U.S. Government and our allies.” Received an endorsed Certificate of Outstanding Support of Civil Affairs from the 358th Civil Affairs Brigade. Led teams working across Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL. Maintained relationships with federal funding agencies, academic and industry researchers, government and commercial software developers, and contracting agencies across more than 100 countries.

2003 to 2008 · Remote / International / Connecticut

Startup Leadership — Operations, Technology, and Strategy

Prior to NPS, held senior operational and leadership roles across multiple startup environments. Responsibilities across this period consistently included daily organizational and technical operations, legal management, contract negotiations, international logistics, strategic leadership, financial management, and brand development. Two areas of work from this period are worth noting. One was pioneering work in online video journalism: developing novel distribution technology and legal frameworks for streaming content from international conflict zones, with direct work on Creative Commons licensing structures and international finance regulations. The second was co-founding one of the first successful online fashion retailers, reaching breakeven within two hours of public launch, with a sustained focus on international sales, novel approaches to online marketing, and supply chain development. The through-line across this period was early and sustained engagement with emerging technology, the legal and organizational infrastructure that makes it deployable at scale, and building in environments without established templates.