Engineering-first CTO

CTO and VP of Engineering at MosaicVoice

November 2023 to present

MosaicVoice is a real-time AI platform for contact centers in healthcare, utilities, hospitality and BPO. It listens to live calls, guides the agent while the call is happening, scores quality automatically and redacts sensitive data on the way through. I own technology strategy, architecture, engineering delivery, infrastructure, security and technical operations.

AI running in production

Automated QA scoring, real-time agent guidance, and PII, PHI and PCI redaction, running against live calls. Plus training simulations and LLM-enabled product workflows. I own the AI and infrastructure budget, so model selection is a cost and accuracy decision I have to defend per call, not a preference.

Three production cloud migrations

Three in production, none with customer-facing downtime, on a platform recording live calls throughout. An AWS re-platform, then AWS to GCP on Cloud Run, GCE and Memorystore under Terraform, and a GCP to Azure cutover in progress.

SOC 2 and PCI

I led the engineering workstream that achieved and maintains SOC 2, and I own PCI DSS self-assessment. Multi-tenant isolation, least privilege access, retention and audit trails are engineering work, so they sit with engineering.

The organization

A distributed engineering team plus external technical partners. Delivery standards, clear technical ownership and release practices I can point at rather than describe.

The marketing site at mosaicvoice.ai is also mine, start to finish. Not a CTO credential, but a fair illustration of the range.

1. A migration is judged on what customers never noticed.

   Three of them now, on a platform that is recording live calls while you move it. The interesting work is not the target architecture, it is sequencing, dual writes, verification and the honest rollback plan you hope not to use. If the status page stayed green and support stayed quiet, it went well. Nothing else counts.

2. Build versus buy is arithmetic, not taste.

   I own the AI budget, so every model decision comes down to accuracy against per-call cost against what it takes to operate. That means measuring usage and quality continuously rather than adopting whatever is currently interesting. Sometimes the answer is the expensive vendor. Sometimes it is a smaller model doing one job well.

3. Compliance is an engineering workstream.

   SOC 2 and PCI do not get delegated to a document and a deadline. They are isolation boundaries, access control, retention rules and audit trails, which are all things engineers build. Treating them as paperwork is how you end up retrofitting them under pressure.

4. I still ship, because judgment decays without it.

   I design, build, deploy and operate my own products on nights and weekends, including the one you are reading. It keeps me honest about what I am asking of the people who work for me, and it is the reason I can still be useful in an architecture review rather than just present at one.

MosaicVoice	CTO & VP of Engineering	2023 to now
Hoken	VP of Engineering	2022 to 2023
Credijusto	Director of Engineering	2020 to 2022
AppFolio	Senior Software Engineer	2019 to 2020
Assured Certificates	CTO & Lead Engineer	2017 to 2019
gap intelligence	Senior Development Manager	2014 to 2016
The ACTIVE Network	Senior Software Engineer	2011 to 2013

Products I designed, built, deployed and still run. Not case studies, live software with real users. Rails on PostgreSQL unless noted.

StudioBloom

Class management for independent studios

The one in commercial use. It runs enrollment and payments for Pachis art studio in San Diego, whose website I built too, so you can go book a class and watch it work. That makes it the most honest test of anything here: when a family cannot enroll, someone loses income that day. Scheduling, registrations, Stripe payments, digital waivers and family-facing accounts, in place of a spreadsheet and a group text. Money moving through it is what makes the edge cases real, and refunds, partial terms, waitlists and the awkward middle states only turn up once actual families are using it.

• Rails 8
• Stripe
• PostgreSQL
• Hotwire

SiteHandled

A productized service, and the platform under it

Small businesses get a real website, hosted and maintained monthly. The interesting half is underneath: a multi-tenant Rails app where every client site resolves by custom domain or subdomain from one host, each one a bespoke build sitting on a shared token contract so tooling can read any site without hardcoding it. Visit attribution, SEO audit reports and a print card generator for outreach come with it. Sites live today include Pachis art studio, Talante and Eliana Bakes, and this page is served by it too.

• Rails 8
• PostgreSQL
• Multi-tenant
• Custom domains

Chapternaut

Reading log and book journal

The most technically involved of these. A reading log built around memory rather than counts, where journal entries pin to the exact page the thought happened on. The LLM features answer in the book's own language rather than the reader's, which sounds small and is the kind of detail that decides whether the feature feels considered. Also carries OCR page capture, spoken entries, Goodreads import and private book clubs.

• Rails 8
• PostgreSQL
• Hotwire
• OpenAI
• Sidekiq
• PWA

Also built and running: FindASub, two-way SMS over Twilio for filling pickup games. BringThis, event signups with LLM assisted setup. Kiuar, permanent QR codes for schools. WatchJar, a shared jar that picks the movie.

Leadership

Engineering strategy, team building, distributed teams, budget ownership, product partnership, vendor and contractor management.

AI and product

AI and LLM product development, production LLM systems, real-time transcription, automated QA scoring, model cost and quality evaluation, build versus buy.

Compliance and security

SOC 2, PCI DSS self-assessment, PII, PHI and PCI redaction, multi-tenant isolation, RBAC and least privilege, data retention and audit trails.

Architecture and cloud

SaaS architecture, AWS, GCP, Azure, Terraform, REST APIs, system integrations, CI and CD, Docker.

Languages and data

Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, React, HTML, CSS. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Sidekiq.

Quality and operations

RSpec, observability, New Relic, reliability, performance optimization, incident management.