About Me
Technologist in Residence at Nava PBC. Building open-source AI tools for government service delivery. ~15 years of full-stack engineering — formerly at USDS supporting the VA. Based in Arlington, VA.
Applied AI
Speaker & Practitioner"Demos, not memos."
Technologist in Residence for Engineering at Nava Labs. 9-month sprint prototyping government AI tools. Managing 8 engineers. Co-founded Nava's AI CoP (350+ at launch). A lot ships open source.
Active Research Areas
- ›Local LLMs and on-device inference (Ollama, llama.cpp)
- ›Fine-tuning via QLoRA and post-training techniques
- ›Synthetic data generation from open-source government datasets
- ›MCP servers and agentic systems for civic tech
- ›Retrieval strategies: BM25, bi-encoder, HyDE, ColBERT, BGE-M3
Speaking
I speak at conferences, meetups, and on podcasts — on applied AI, government tech, and building in the open.
Recent talk: "Open-Source GenAI for Government Forms, Referrals, and Caseworker Workflows" at GW OSCON.
Speaker Inquiry →Current Projects
CivBench
Open benchmark for evaluating AI agents on government tasks. Four-level task taxonomy, built on Inspect AI and Harbor.
Caseworker AI Toolkit
Six-module open-source monorepo with LangGraph-based subagent orchestration for benefits caseworkers.
synthetic-gov-data-kit
Python library for generating synthetic government benefits data (SNAP, WIC, Medicaid) grounded in Census distributions — for model eval and fine-tuning.
astro-gov-starter
Astro 5 + USWDS 3 + Tailwind 4 + i18n starter for government websites. Section 508 compliant. Plain language linting in CI.
EmailBits
HTML email template library with AI-powered creation. 200+ templates, cross-client testing across 10 providers.
retrieval-showdown
Benchmarking harness comparing retrieval strategies head-to-head: BM25, bi-encoder, HyDE, ColBERT, BGE-M3.
Background
~15 years of full-stack engineering across high-growth startups (JazzHR, Ibotta) and large public institutions. Spent four years as a Digital Services Expert at the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of the CTO, brought in through the U.S. Digital Service.
At the VA:
- — Inaugural lead of the Engineering Community of Practice, recruiting and managing ~12 engineers across health, benefits, and digital service modernization
- — Led Veteran-facing identity modernization with Login.gov and ID.me; architected SSO for VA.gov and MyHealtheVet
- — Built the internal developer platform managing 600+ APIs with standardized paths to production
Frontend
- React
- Angular
- TypeScript
Backend
- Node.js
- Go
- PHP
- Python (entry-level)
Infrastructure
- AWS
- Azure (entry-level)
- Kubernetes
Practices
- API Design
- Domain-Driven Design
- Micro-Frontends
Beyond the Work
- — Former Guinness World Record holder — tallest stack of waffles (67cm, set in 2018). We held it for a while.
- — Helped pass Denver Ballot Measure 2H (November 2020) alongside Spencer McCullough. Passed with 83.5% of the vote — opting Denver out of a 2005 state law that blocked municipalities from providing broadband internet.
- — Girl dad. The early weeks are documented at earlydays.app.
- — Green Bay Packers fan. Strong ties to Brazil — follow Palmeiras, would live in Latin America if given half a chance.
- — Home improvement and gardening hobbyist. Currently in Arlington, VA.
Open Source
Active GitHub profile with 6 published Astro themes — 100+ combined stars across everything from government USWDS starters to GenAI startup landing pages to skeuomorphic UI experiments.
Also maintaining civic tech tools, benchmarking harnesses, and the occasional weird side project.
Currently Available For
- •Conference & meetup talks
- •Podcast conversations
- •Technical strategy consulting
- •Fractional CTO engagements
- •Architecture design & review
- •Hands-on coding