Career

The telecom pod owns the core messaging, telephony and cellular experiences that tens of millions of monthly active TextNow users depend on to stay connected. This includes the successful delivery of billions of messages, the timely establishment of tens of millions of calls, and routing tens of terabytes of cellular data each month. I am the direct leader of 2 engineering managers, 3 staff/senior staff engineers, and a network analyst; and the indirect leader of twenty frontend and backend engineers. We integrate closely with over a dozen vendor partners, deploy large-scale telco networking infrastructure in multiple AWS regions, and manage a multi-million DID inventory.

Key Accomplishments:

• established clear success metrics, OKRs and multiple 6 month delivery plans; aligning stakeholders and team members around common goals which has led to successful, on-time delivery of features across the calling, messaging and carrier products
• through clear communication and goal-setting, raised the team eNPS score from 6.8 to 7.7 over a 2 quarter period

The Head of Wireless Evolution was an interim role created to own the engineering delivery of the largest and most technically complicated project the company had undertaken to that point - launching wireless service to its customers as a full MVNO. There were multiple pillars of the project which I led in this role: the deployment of a commercial Evolved Packet Core (EPC) in AWS, the development of a multi-IMSI compatible SIM profile, the integration of the existing TextNow systems to the EPC (the OSS/BSS integration work), and the validation and testing verifying it was all working ahead of customer launch. This included the technical ownership of a half dozen vendors delivery timelines.

This was primarily a technical leadership and delivery role. While I only had 2 direct reports in this role, at the project peak I was responsible for the work of 20 engineers (across infrastructure, Android, iOS, web, backend and quality). In the span of 9 months, the project transformed the TextNow wireless offering from delivering service as a thin MVNO running through an MVNE, to delivering service to customers on our own PLMN through our own LTE packet core. The launch of the 314-730 PLMN was the direct result of the work that the team delivered while I was in this role.

Key Accomplishments:

• delivered a cellular core network from conception to in-service, customer usage in less than 9 months
• established a clear project plan and timeline; and through consistent prioritization and reviews was able to deliver only 1 week later than a date set 8 months prior
• delivered a platform with a 10% improvement in initial data attach success as compared to our previous thin MVNO setup

As the Head of Core & Infrastructure Engineering I was responsible for both the Core Engineering & Infrastructure Engineering departments. I was responsible for all of the calling & messaging experiences our customers experienced; along with the infrastructure engineering department including Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering & Quality Engineering. In this role I directly managed team of 6 people leaders and 4 staff ICs, and had over 50 ICs and an additional 2 managers as indirect reports.

This role was created during a reorganization which brought two very different departments under my leadership, and I had to quickly establish a new leadership group, a common team purpose and get these groups working well together. Within the first month we introduced a new way of doing planning with my product counterparts; establishing a biannual cadence which brought clarity and focus to the team going into 2024.

In the first half of 2024 I worked closely with my new leadership team, my product counterparts, and the executive team of the company to identify a more scalable leadership structure. In July of 2024 I led this group through a reorganization which delivered clarity of ownership across the Core and Infrastructure departments by elevating a strong manager on the team to lead the Infrastructure department. Through this process I identified roles which did not fit into the organization, and managed down the headcount budget to meet the company’s H2 budget constraints.

In this role I was able to support the career growth of multiple senior ICs and managers; supporting the growth of one IC into an engineering manager role, the growth of an engineering manager into an engineering director role, the growth a staff developer into a senior staff role, and the stepping back of an engineering manager to an IC role. All the individuals identified are still playing these roles in the organization as of the end of 2025, a testament to their hard word and the success of their promotions.

In this role I also took on responsibility for multiple long-running technical projects which had to be brought back on track.

The first project, the replacement of our billing system, had started in the second half of 2023 as a rewrite of an existing billing system using an open-source billing system. Digging in to the decision making process, I identified that the original approach was taken based on the incorrect assumption that there was no budget available to consider commercial options; when doing a full cost analysis it became clear that going with a commercial offering would significantly reduce the complexity to maintain the system, would allow for faster iteration by product & marketing individuals once the project was completed, and would ultimately be a more affordable option long-term. The project was early enough on in its lifecycle that it made sense to restart the project using a commercial solution, and in the second half of the year the project was on track to deliver against the updated timelines established with product. It was ultimately delivered in 2025, after I transitioned ownership of it to another leader.

The second project came into my scope of responsibility after the July 2024 reorg, which was the rewrite of the iOS application messaging experience. This project had gone through several iterations prior to me taking it over, and it was significantly behind schedule. After a project review with the product and engineering members of the team, it became clear that early technical decisions to replace multiple core components concurrently (introducing a new storage layer, a reactive UI framework, and SwiftUI) meant the project still had significant technical hurdles to clear before it would be able to offer parity with the existing application, and there was no confidence it would be delivered until well into H1 of 2025. Based on all the factors, I made the decision to stop this project and move to an incremental approach of rewriting the messaging experience piecemeal. As a result, in Q4 of 2024 the team delivered more features than it had delivered in the preceding 12 months.

Key Accomplishments:

• restructured several under-performing teams and projects, increasing delivery velocity and meeting newly committed timelines
• identified, supported and drove the promotions for individuals to both manager and director-level positions internally

In this role I was originally the most senior individual contributor in the engineering team; over time the role included managing a total of 4 staff engineers.

Identified critical technical and operational gaps in our message spam detection engine, and drove alignment across the company that these gaps would be best solved through a commercial solution. I owned the Request for Proposal (RFP) process which identified multiple possible solutions (including augmenting our in-house system), and I led the integration of the commercial solutions which ran live alongside our existing system to provide a real-time measure of accuracy and efficacy of the commercial offerings. The conclusion of the RFP saw one of the commercial vendors being selected, and I then owned the operationalization of the vendor for the first year of its time with TextNow.

After launching Nationwide Talk & Text (NWTT), I identified that the day-to-day operations required a level of operational capability with the Sandvine platform we were lacking in-house. I identified a consulting firm which had subject matter expertise with the Sandvine platform, got alignment with the leadership team on the approach, and then on-boarded them to own the operations of the Sandvine platform. This allowed us to iterate on features in NWTT at a significantly faster pace, allowing our product team to identify and test further improvements to the NWTT solution in the months following initial launch.

As a senior member of the engineering leadership team, I participated in the hiring and on-boarding of over a dozen individuals during rapid growth at the company during COVID. This included hiring for both management & IC roles, across both team and department level scope.

As the company scaled, I partnered with our legal & people teams to define our internal data access policy, training to support the policy, and processes to ensure the policy was being followed. I subsequently partnered with the legal and engineering teams on ensuring compliance across a number of telecommunication regulations.

Led the engineering delivery of a successful IRAP funded program to develop innovative short-duration wireless plans that enabled customers to offer lower-cost ways to access wireless data service.

Key Accomplishments:

• proposed, organized, ran the RFP and ultimately drove the selection of a commercial messaging spam vendor to increase the accuracy of the spam detection engine
• on-boarded a group of SMEs to reduce fraud costs and optimize our traffic management platform
• partnered successfully with stakeholders inside and outside of engineering to increase the maturity of the company’s compliance posture across a number of areas

Led the engineering development of the Nationwide Talk & Text (NWTT) wireless plan offering; a first truly free calling & messaging experience with coverage across the United States. After purchasing a SIM card, a user who was on the NWTT plan was able to use the TextNow calling & messaging experience whether they were connected to Wi-Fi or using the TextNow SIM, all for $0. This solved one of the most persistent customer complaints - that TextNow only worked while connected to Wi-Fi. As part of this, I learned the Sandscript language, used by Sandvine to program its traffic management platform, to build the first version of the rules which made NWTT possible.

In collaboration with our engineering leadership team, I developed a technical vision and roadmap for engineering at TextNow. This included describing what criteria we used to make technical decisions, how we made build vs. buy tradeoff decisions, and how we resolved technical disagreements. As part of the roadmap exercise I identified our 3 year technical vision, and in conjunction with the executive team we made the decision to begin building our own in-house calling SDK based on top of WebRTC.

As an active contributor to the backend systems, I helped build the plan for our AWS migration, and also built components of the system to facilitate this migration. This was a multi-quarter effort which culminated in the successful live cutover of customer traffic in January of 2020 with no data loss.

Key Accomplishments:

• led the engineering work to deliver NWTT to our customers; the first truly free calling & messaging service that worked across both Wi-Fi and cellular networks
• learned the Sandvine Sandscript scripting language and developed the traffic management logic necessary to make NWTT possible
• key engineering contributor to the migration of the TextNow backend from a hosted data centre to AWS with no downtime

Led a team of 4 backend engineers who owned the wireless and phone numbering services. Owned the API integration with Sprint (our MVNO partner at the time) and Kore Wireless, an MVNE partner we used for some customer trials. Led the transition to manage subscriber data plane traffic using the Sandvine traffic management platform, and owned the operations of this system once the migration was complete.

Identified the opportunity for increased performance and developer velocity by introducing a typed programming language to the backend stack. Built the initial service architecture for Go microservices on the backend, and utilized it in a high-volume request flow to introduce additional messaging spam checks. This allows the team to rapidly iterate and introduce additional parallel checks, increasing the performance of our messaging pipeline while also increasing the accuracy of the spam checks by running multiple in parallel.

Key Accomplishments:

• led the migration of all wireless subscriber data traffic to the Sandvine traffic management platform
• introduced the Go programming language to the backend development team; establishing its initial best practices and patterns for use
• delivered a dedicated microservice that utilized a plugin framework to parallelize spam checks on our outbound messaging content; increasing the amount of spam caught by >100%

When I first joined TextNow as a developer on the backend team, I built features in the PHP monolith and Ruby microservices powering the TextNow service at the time.

Key Accomplishments:

• added the capability for a second brand to be added to the API within 3 months of starting, unlocking a key business growth channel in the years to come
• consolidated and simplified the push services spanning iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Amazon and web implementations

I joined Zootly as one of the first engineers; where I built multiple backend services in node.js which powered the platform. The services I developed included the API and storage layer used by the clients and driver applications to submit and view orders, payment processing through an integration with the Authorize.Net payment gateway, and job assignment and routing based on an integration with the HERE APIs.

Key Accomplishments:

• launched the initial version of the service in a 6 month time frame
• iterated and added functionality based on trial and customer feedback

I was a key member of the engineering team, building the embedded networking engine which enabled aggregation and handoff across radios. I built backend features in C++, along with integrating the core C++ engine into Android & iOS applications. The work I undertook led to multiple issued patents, as well as my Master’s thesis. I worked closely with the leadership team to hire multiple full-time engineers as well as coop students. I worked on R&D tax credit program, participated in sales calls alongside our executive team, and led trials at multiple carriers in North America and the Middle East. When I left the company in 2015 I was the Chief Technology Officer.

Key Accomplishments:

• built and optimized multi-Gbps packet processing logic in software
• had multiple patents issued based on ideas developed
• built and led a team of multiple developers