Senior to Staff Career Strategy

I help Linux, cloud infrastructure, DevOps/SRE and security engineers grow into senior, staff, and principal roles. Bring the technical problems and career decisions you’re working through. We’ll work on both.

I’m a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI. As Principal Linux Security Engineer at Block, I founded Linux Security Engineering and took its core security platform from concept to company-wide adoption. I set the technical direction, built the systems, and worked across teams to make them the standard. At AWS, as a Senior Linux Systems Development Engineer, I architected and scaled security infrastructure across eight regions, processing petabytes of logs daily from tens of millions of Linux hosts.

I got started at 15, buying a 56k modem with paper-route money and wrestling with Slackware to learn Linux. Years later, I built a computing cluster out of 75 Android phones just to see what I could make it do. After 25 years in tech, I still love figuring things out, especially with someone who wants to understand how it all works.

Bring a system design you’d like feedback on, a Linux or networking problem you can’t pin down, or a security control you’re trying to get into production. We’ll trace what’s happening, check the assumptions, and work through your options. We’ll talk through your reasoning together and work on the parts that need more thought. For security work, that includes whether a control addresses the actual threat and what it will cost your team to operate it.

If you’re aiming for a senior or staff role, we’ll look at what you own today and where you want to grow. That might be technical depth, experience leading work across teams, or making your contribution visible. We’ll identify work you can take on in your current role and discuss how to get useful feedback from your manager before promotion time.

I’ve conducted more than 180 interviews for Amazon Web Services and served as an Amazon Bar Raiser. We’ll prepare for your interviews using your projects: why you chose an approach, which alternatives you rejected, what you personally owned, and what happened. I’ll tell you where your answer is convincing and where I still have questions.

I’ve taught Linux, Python, shell scripting, networking, and system design, and mentored engineers throughout my career. At AWS, I formally mentored seven engineers. I’ve helped people earn promotions across security engineering, systems engineering, systems development, and data-center operations. I love seeing someone gain the confidence to take the next step on their own.

We’ll start with what you want to accomplish and one problem worth working on first. Each call should leave you with something to try, a decision to make, or a clearer explanation of your work. We’ll come back to what happened and adjust. Expect honest feedback, patience when the work is hard, and questions that make you think. Tell me what you’re working on and where you’re stuck. We can take it from there.