Summary
Senior systems architect and engineer specializing in the design,
build, operation, and support of high-performance computing clusters for
scientific research. Proven track record supporting systems at all
scales, from small research support clusters to the design and
deployment of the largest LLM training systems.
Professional Experience
Senior Manager, High Performance Compute, IonQ, 2026
- Present
- Team lead for “classical” HPC systems used internally to support
IonQ quantum computing research
Principal Engineer/Director, NVIDIA, 2022 - 2026
- Led the architecture for multiple cluster designs based on Grace
Hopper, Grace Blackwell, and Vera Rubin platforms
- Designed next-gen network fabrics based on InfiniBand, RoCE, and
NVLink
- Led technical collaboration with key customers on hyperscale AI
training and inference clusters based on NVIDIA reference
architectures
- Developed a systematic approach to the design of new architectures
to speed iteration and time to deployment
- Developed automation and performed at-scale troubleshooting for Eos,
a 4,000+ GPU DGX H100 SuperPOD
Senior Solutions Architect, NVIDIA, 2019 - 2022
- Customer-facing systems architect for design of supercomputing
systems
- Automation and deployment for Selene, a 4,000+ GPU DGX A100
SuperPOD
- Systems software lead for several early SuperPOD deployments,
including developing the automation system for these clusters
- Technical lead for multiple RFP responses for supercomputing
projects at Department of Energy sites
Senior Production Engineer, Facebook, 2017 -
2019
- Production Engineering lead for metadata services of Tectonic,
Facebook’s exabyte-scale distributed filesystem
- Migrated Tectonic control plane services to shared container
management platform, freeing >60% of high-cost instances and reducing
on-call burden
- Developed and deployed automated capacity planning tools based on
actual and projected traffic requirements
- Characterized the performance of Tectonic storage service on a
next-generation storage server (“Bryce Canyon”)
- Onboarded and mentored several new team members, from interns to
senior engineers
HPC Cluster Administrator, Los Alamos National
Laboratory, 2014 - 2017
- Production team lead for deployment of Trinity, a 20,000-node Cray
XC40 supercomputer
- Developed system automation for configuration and production
operations of LANL capability systems, including leading a migration
from Cfengine to Ansible
HPC/Cloud Systems Engineer, NVIDIA, 2012 - 2014
- Supported an early internal HPC development platform for the
Solution Architect team, including ongoing hardware and software
refresh
- Developed internal and cloud-hosted training platform for customer
tutorials, including at conferences such as Supercomputiong and GTC
Systems Engineer, R Systems NA, 2010 - 2012
- Developed custom cluster designs to support particular customer
workloads, including climate simulations, financial modeling, and
Formula-One racing
Education
M.S., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Materials Science and Engineering.
Thesis title: Fabrication,
dynamics, and self-assembly of anisotropic colloidal particles.
B.S., Michigan Technological University,
Physics.
Minors in Mathematics and Electronic Materials.
Skills and Technologies
- HPC/ML infrastructure:
- Compute: NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, HGX, and GB200/GB300
- Networking: InfiniBand (NDR, XDR), RoCE (NVIDIA Spectrum-X),
NVLink
- Storage: Lustre, Ceph, HDFS, S3-compatible, Tectonic
- Workload Mgmt: Kubernetes, Slurm, PBS/Torque/Moab
- Programming & Automation:
- Languages: Python, Go, (Production); Rust, OCaml (Hobby)
- Automation: Ansible, Terraform, Cfengine, AWS, Azure