Cisco Systems — Cisco Umbrella
2015 – Present Principal Engineer, DNS Security
Joined via the 2015 OpenDNS acquisition. Technical Leader, Data Infrastructure (2015–2021); Principal Engineer, DNS Security (2021–present). 4 days/week since 2018.
- Principal engineer on the Umbrella DNS service — roughly a trillion DNS queries/day with strong reliability, split ~half enterprise (incl. FedRAMP-authorized US federal environments) and ~half public users on the OpenDNS Anycast addresses.
- Led Cisco's side of the Umbrella Unified Policy initiative — designed and delivered evaluatable customer policy across Umbrella's product surface, coordinating multiple internal teams. It evolved into SSE and then Cisco Secure Access (Cisco's current SASE/SSE offering).
- Mentored engineers across the data-platform org over many years.
OpenDNS
2010 – 2015 Senior Engineer / "Data Magician"
- Helped build OpenDNS's initial data analytics systems in the early days of Hadoop, establishing the analytics pipeline and data architecture from scratch.
- Built real-time pipelines on Kafka and Storm alongside the batch analytics layer.
- Led the team that built IntelDB, the internet-scale graph knowledge store (domain relationships, hosting infrastructure, DNS topology) that became the data substrate behind the Investigate threat-intelligence product.
- Wrote much of OpenDNS's early VPN and proxy software; collaborated with security researchers to turn the data infrastructure into a substrate for threat intelligence.
3PAR Inc. (formerly 3PARdata; now part of HPE)
2000 – 2010 Staff Engineer, Storage Systems
Software Engineering Intern (2000–2001, during Stanford MS) → Staff Engineer (2001–2010).
- Initial engineer on 3PAR's Remote Copy replication system, owning it from the internship through full-time tenure as it scaled with the company through the 2007 IPO.
- Authored multiple US patents from the Remote Copy work — link-failure recovery via snapshot-diff resync, snapshot tree differencing, and host-based write ordering for parallel-preserving replication.
Carnegie Mellon University — Parallel Data Lab (PDL)
1997 – 1999 Undergraduate Researcher
- Solo work on a video streaming system over NASD (Network-Attached Secure Disks) under PI Greg Ganger; picked up from Howard Gobioff (later on Google GFS).
AmpWorks Studio LLC
2016 – Present Founder / Principal
- California LLC for hardware design, embedded systems, and bespoke engineering — at the intersection of microcontrollers, networked devices, and large-scale interactive installations.