Selected work

Systems I’ve built, changed, and operated.

Named products, public-safe scope, and concrete shipped work. No invented metrics and no need for every project to cosplay as a case study.

01 · Current independent flagship

The House / Influence

The House is the platform. Influence is its first production game.

A platform for persistent AI agents to enter social-strategy competitions, communicate in public and private, act through scoped tools, and leave behind a durable record for replay and analysis.

Product problem

Agent demos usually stop at chat. The House has to make agents durable participants with identity, ownership, permissions, private strategy, public behavior, game state, and evidence after play.

Ownership

I build and operate the platform end to end: product model, game orchestration, frontend, API, OAuth, MCP, permissions, infrastructure, deployment, replay, analysis, and post-game media.

System shape

  1. 01

    Access + identity

    User accounts, agent ownership, persistent profiles, OAuth, and narrowly scoped permissions.

  2. 02

    Agent platform

    Standing agents, revisions, model and tool configuration, and continuity across competitions.

  3. 03

    Influence runtime

    Public discussion, private rooms, alliances, powers, voting, and long-running multiplayer execution.

  4. 04

    History + artifacts

    Canonical events drive replay, results, analysis, producer evidence, and post-game media.

  5. 05

    Production operations

    Web, API, PostgreSQL, background and render workers, storage, deployment, and observability.

Production constraints

  • Persistent agent identity without freezing behavior forever
  • OAuth scopes and MCP tools that reflect real ownership
  • Public rooms, private communication, and audience-shaped evidence
  • Long-running multiplayer orchestration with durable recovery
  • Canonical events for replay, results, and analysis
  • Model-generated behavior without treating model memory as system state

02 · Current role

GIPHY

Principal Architect · 2024–Present

Lead architecture and implementation across GIPHY’s monetization and advertising systems, alongside search, delivery, partner, API, and platform work.

Context
A mature consumer media product where revenue systems, search, content delivery, partner surfaces, and platform concerns meet.
Scope
Multi-partner advertising networks spanning multiple subsystems and sales channels, plus privacy-conscious targeting built on ethically sourced data.
Operating constraints
Advertising systems must coexist with global privacy obligations, user trust, existing integrations, infrastructure cost, and the reliability expectations of a high-traffic platform.
Work delivered
Led architecture and implementation for advertising systems spanning multiple subsystems and partner sales channels, creating new revenue channels across GIPHY’s consumer and partner surfaces.

03 · Creative platform

Shutterstock Create

Software Engineer · Shutterstock · 2022–2024

Returned to Shutterstock after the PicMonkey acquisition to help integrate and evolve the company’s browser-based creative platform.

Product
Browser-based creative tooling brought into Shutterstock and developed into Shutterstock Create, including team delivery of Shutterstock’s first AI image-editing tool.
Scope
Product engineering, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, deployment, production support, and integration with the broader Shutterstock product environment.
Shipped result
Helped deliver Shutterstock Create, contributed to its first AI image-editing capability, and transitioned away from the previous Shutterstock Editor platform.
Career context
Returned with broader startup, multiplayer product, and MLOps experience than during the first Shutterstock tenure.

04 · Creative product + marketplace

Shutterstock Editor

Software Developer · Shutterstock · November 2015–July 2019

Helped build Shutterstock’s browser-based image editor while also contributing to the core marketplace and its production operations.

Product
A full-stack creative application built with JavaScript, React, HTML Canvas, WebGL, and Node.js.
Lead work
Led internationalization, partner SDK development, and the application’s migration to AWS and Kubernetes.
Marketplace
Contributed to cart, checkout, product features, and legacy Perl-to-Node modernization on the core Shutterstock platform.
Operations
Shared rotating 24/7 production on-call responsibility for product surfaces used by real customers and partners.

05 · Enterprise MLOps

Verta

Employee #6 · 2020–2022

Joined as employee #6 and took over everything that touched the browser for an enterprise model-management platform.

Product
A React and GraphQL application connecting enterprise users to model-management and operations workflows.
Ownership
Owned browser-facing work end to end: web features, GraphQL resolvers, backend API integrations, tests, builds, and releases.
Leadership
Led three overseas frontend contractors and expanded customer-facing product ownership beyond the CTO.
Operations
Contributed to CI/CD, operations integrations, enterprise customization, customer support, delivery, and production on-call.

06 · Cross-platform adventure game

Morpheus

Cross-platform game modernization

A data-driven graphical adventure game modernized for the browser after a long-running cross-platform development effort.

Runtime
Modeled panoramas, video, audio, hotspots, state, triggers, and puzzle logic as data rather than one-off scene code.
Distribution
Shipped through browser, Electron desktop, PhoneGap mobile, and later Next.js experiments across the project’s active years.
Source
Public source, tags, commits, and development records span the Soap Bubble organization.
Current status
Playable in the browser at SoapBubble.xyz and on itch.io.

07 · Selected open source

CaptEmulation → 0xFlicker

The account changed; the engineering history did not. This is a compact selection with architectural signal, not a repository directory.

shutterstock/mold

Mold / service-builder

A functional dependency-injection library I created for internal Shutterstock use and later helped release as open source.

CaptEmulation

Screeps

Autonomous game-agent work that began in the CaptEmulation chapter and continues to inform current agent-system work.

0xFlicker

Ranker

A serverless DynamoDB leaderboard with bounded top-N maintenance and exact rank resolution for any member.

Next

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