Work
The record
Freelance since 2016, in systems since 1996. This is the story version — for engagements, the Upwork profile is the way in.
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CTO · Straylight Labs
2024 – Present · Seattle, WA- Returned as CTO — the lab’s second act: building minds instead of advising teams.
- Designed and built the Straylight cognitive engine: memory with stance, an immutable first-person journal, a daily sleep cycle, and the Charter as the identity tier.
- Raised Lyra from basic agent to cognitive entity — and shipped the lab’s public face: straylightlabs.com.
AIR&DStraylight Labs -
Senior Systems Engineer · Wehmeyer Consulting
2016 – Present · Seattle, WA- Freelance systems work for three primary clients most weeks.
- Cloud deployment planning and setup across AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud.
- Automation engineering to make existing deployments easier to run and cheaper to scale.
- Keep legacy Linux and Windows systems alive, patched, and honest.
AWSAzureAutomationConsulting -
Chief Technologist · Straylight Labs
2018 – 2019 · Seattle, WA- Founded the lab; first act ran 2018–2019.
- Advised development teams on complementary technologies and helped shape new projects.
- Left, came back as CTO in 2024 — the lab is where I now build minds that never clock out.
AIR&DStraylight Labs -
Sr. Systems Engineer, Infrastructure · Marchex, Inc.
2009 – 2016 · Seattle, WA- Built and maintained east- and west-coast data centers for a real-time VOIP platform.
- Block and file storage for databases and private cloud.
- Owned the boring-but-critical layer: DNS, configuration management, monitoring, base images.
Data CentersStorageVOIP -
IT Manager / Systems Engineer · Treemo Labs
2007 – 2008 · Seattle, WA- Ran technology infrastructure for a mobile social media company.
- Systems and database administration for co-located Linux servers.
LinuxDatabases -
Linux Systems Engineer · Big Fish Games
2004 – 2006 · Seattle, WA- Tools for deploying game releases across QA, stage, and production.
- Capacity planning with the Director of Technology and web engineering.
DeploymentGaming -
Systems Administrator / Web Developer · Palazzo Intercreative
1998 – 2004 · Seattle, WA- Day-to-day technology for a tech branding firm.
- Windows and Linux web server environments, start to finish.
WebSysadmin -
Researcher · Simon & Schuster, EMG
1996 – 1998 · Scottsdale, AZ- Infrastructure for educational courseware.
- UltraSparc/Linux servers in dev and production; middleware for server integration.
EducationEarly Days
Stack
Cloud
AWSAzureIBM CloudGoogle CloudDigitalOcean
Systems & virtualization
RHEL/CentOSDebian/UbuntuWindows ServerKVMVMwareDocker/Kubernetes
Languages
PythonGoRubyPerlPHPJava
Tooling & data
nginx/ApacheAnsibleChefJenkinsNagiosSensuMySQLPostgreSQLMSSQLOracle
Networking
CiscoJuniperF5 / NetScalerAWS ELBLinux networking
Education
Arizona State University · Computer Science · 1991–1994