Frequently asked questions

Answers to the questions I get asked most in interviews. The details (titles, dates, education) are in my résumé, available on request.

Working with me

What kind of management brings out your best work?

Servant leadership: managers who put the team's growth and well-being first. I do my best work on small, strong teams that care about the outcome.

How do you approach an unexpected challenge?

I research and gather information on my own first, so I understand the problem before I bring it to anyone. If I'm still stuck, I escalate early and bring what I've learned and the options I see, not just the problem.

Have you worked at a startup?

Yes. I spent more than five years at an early-stage FinTech data company, where I led engineering and shipped with a small team.

What's your strongest programming language?

C#. I also work in TypeScript and React, JavaScript, Python, and SQL. The rest is in my toolbox.

Are you authorized to work in the US?

Yes. I'm a US citizen and don't need visa sponsorship, now or in the future.

Decisions and best work

Tell me about a technical decision you made that didn't come from a PM or manager.

At a FinTech data company, a major partner wanted to embed our app inside theirs and offer it to all their customers. The deal depended on single sign-on in an older protocol, and we had about three months.

I kept hitting roadblocks with the legacy platform our app ran on. After about a week, I tried a demo app on the latest platform and the sign-on worked. I didn't want to port the app at that point, but after wrestling with it for a few days, I showed the CEO the working demo, convinced him it was the right call, and pivoted to a port of the parts the partner needed.

I laid out the sign-on, designed the app structure, and built a few key sections before handing the rest to my team. We shipped on time alongside our other work. We kept our word to the partner, their customers used our app inside their platform without a separate login, and the port left us on a modern platform that made the work after it easier.

What project brought out your best work, and why?

A licensing-data pipeline for a healthcare software company. The team needed leads for their marketing, and their customers are licensed care facilities, so the data was on state licensing websites. Every state has its own rules, every site is different, and none of them have APIs.

I wrote the first version by hand against Arizona to prove browser automation could do it. Once it worked, I used Claude Code to work through the remaining states one at a time and find alternate sources. In parallel I set up the Azure hosting: a small SQL Server database, a containerized app to keep costs down, an API secured with a key, and a CI/CD pipeline. I kept the raw data as JSON so it can always be reviewed.

It now covers 59 sources across all 50 states and nearly 50,000 facilities, recovers on its own when a site misbehaves, and keeps the data current as licenses change month to month. It was my best work because I owned it end to end: I saw the need, picked the approach, and took it from the first prototype to production. Architecture deep dive.

What are you most proud of building?

  • A no-API licensing-data pipeline: 59 public sources across all 50 states, nearly 50,000 care facilities, running unattended and current month to month. Deep dive
  • A platform port that saved a partner deal: proved single sign-on with a working demo, convinced the CEO to port, and led the team to ship on a three-month deadline. Full story
  • An automated publishing platform: a cloud pipeline that publishes to partner sites with no API, with 1,000× the output and 5× revenue growth over two years. Deep dive
  • A React modernization: rebuilt a telematics data platform's front end into a coherent codebase and took test coverage from 0% to 98%. Case study

AI in my workflow

Which AI tools do you use?

Claude and Claude Code, every day. I used Cursor daily for about six months on a telematics platform, but its usage-based pricing was hard to keep within budget. I find Claude's spend easier to manage, and since I choose my own plan, I've moved up from Pro to Max 5x to Max 20x so I'm never rationing it.

How do you use AI to speed up development?

When there's any uncertainty in the scope or the solution, I start in plan mode and agree on the approach before any code gets written. For minor issues, auto mode works well. I keep one chat per feature so the context stays focused, and I test every change myself on a staging site before it goes live. For a men's health clinic I build for, that means changes land in about a tenth of the time they used to, which saves them money and gets them results sooner.

On larger work, AI takes the repetitive parts. On the licensing-data pipeline, I proved the approach by hand, then let Claude Code work through the states one at a time while I built the hosting, database, API, and CI/CD. That kept me focused on the system as a whole.

Who's responsible for code that AI helps write?

I am. AI helps me do more, but I review it, test it, and own what ships.

Another question?

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