Strategic Technical Judgment
Summary
The hardest engineering decisions aren’t technical—they're organizational.
Knowing when to stop shipping, when to invest in foundations, and when architecture is the business problem requires judgment that doesn't come from a framework. It comes from operating platforms where the wrong call has immediate, measurable consequences. I bring that judgment to build-vs-buy decisions, platform strategy, and the trade-offs that shape whether an engineering organization compounds advantage or compounds debt.
What this looks like
Architecture as economics — Technical choices evaluated as margin decisions, not resume-building exercises.
Build-vs-buy rigor — Vendor evaluations with financial modeling, proof-of-concept discipline, and organizational alignment.
Platform-first prioritization — Debt reduction, observability, and tooling investments that lower the cost of every future sprint.
Reframing technical debt as revenue risk — Making the case to executive leadership in language that creates space to act.
Why this matters
Every engineering organization faces the tension between shipping features and fixing foundations. The leaders who navigate that tension well don’t just manage backlogs—they change how the organization thinks about risk, cost, and investment.
How I’ve done it
Dayforce — Reframed fraud exposure as a revenue problem, creating executive support to pause feature delivery and stabilize a $7B+ platform.
Consulting — Collapsed 37 fragmented codebases into a multi-tenant platform architecture, enabling 200+ deployments from shared code.
Dayforce — Led evaluations of Pluralsight Flow, IPQualityScore, and LaunchDarkly, building vendor assessment frameworks with direct financial and operational impact.
