About
who I am, in plain language
I'm a curious, self-driven builder with an unusual combination of backgrounds —
creative tech, audio engineering, and the factory floor.
I studied Creative Technology at Illinois State University — a
program built exactly for people like me: hybrids who don't fit cleanly into
"designer," "engineer," or "artist" because the interesting work lives between
those categories. Since graduating in 2021 I've spent every year deepening that
range.
Before any of the technical work, there was sound. I've spent
years engineering, producing, and mixing — from vocal sessions to livestream
boards to late-night freelance gigs. Audio is the discipline that shaped
everything else: the patience to listen for the problem nobody else is hearing,
the taste to know when something is actually finished, and the humility to
stay with a track until it's right. Those instincts didn't go away when I
moved into other work. They're how I approach every technical problem now.
Over the last two years at Rivian, I've learned what production
actually looks like from the inside — what breaks, what drags, where good people
end up doing work a computer should be doing. When I rotated onto the
Autonomy team, I didn't just do the work assigned to me; I found
a repetitive task in the workflow and built a tool to solve it.
That combination — creative ear, engineering instinct, real operational
experience — is what I bring. I don't pretend to be a career software
engineer. I'm a builder who teaches himself whatever the problem demands, ships
something, and iterates until it's right. I've done that in studios, on the line,
and on my own time.