Direction: forward deployment engineering
Twenty years shipping production web systems, leading teams, and turning messy operations into usable software. SMB-forward and enterprise-capable, strongest where client communication, design judgment, and engineering execution have to meet.
Who I Am
Production web systems from architecture through launch. WordPress, Astro, PHP, JavaScript, React, Node.js, whatever the platform needs. The through-line is engineering judgment that keeps teams shipping under real constraints.
I embed with the people doing the work, map the real bottlenecks, and stay close enough to make sure the system survives contact with the business. I am not trying to be the lone owner of a 5,000-person enterprise machine. I am better used where communication and building can still move the work.
Agent workflows, quality gates, automation that ships real work. Not demo theater. I use AI as leverage inside delivery systems with scoped workflows, review checkpoints, and test handoffs.
Remote, always. Three kids and a wife. That's the whole why. Everything else is just how. Build something they can stand on, build something that holds.
The Arc
University of Miami, School of Architecture. A five-year professional program I finished in four and a half. Years of critiques taught me how to take hard feedback, iterate in public, and pull a room together around a single idea. That's where I learned to lead. Real estate in Jersey after that, then Zubillaga Design back in Florida. High-end residential and commercial work across Florida, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Certificates at Miami Dade. Founded and ran a boutique WordPress agency. Learned how to ship client work, manage delivery, and build systems from zero. Agency life taught me how to deploy under real constraints before I ever touched enterprise scale.
Led 100+ engineers across time zones for Fortune 500 clients. Built the systems, processes, and culture that let teams ship reliably at scale. 96% retention. 15 promotions. The machine ran and kept running after I left.
Now I'm back. You can try to knock me down, but you're going to have to hit harder because I keep surviving.
Founded Survivor Science in 2022, a survivor-focused recovery community. 50+ members, stroke and chronic illness survivors, building back together. Multi-channel content, podcast collaborations, peer support. The rebuild does not end. You just start bringing other people with you.
Plumbing apprentice through NEFBA. Same systems thinking from architecture school, now applied to physical infrastructure. When I deploy something, it has to work in the real world, not just in theory.
Running digital operations for Plumber Marketing Firm. Building autonomous agent teams that ship real client work overnight. Working across models, harnesses, agent frameworks, and production workflows more deeply than most people ever need to. Founded Lovable Gazelle to put senior engineering leadership, web platforms, forward delivery, and practical AI together. The architect never left. He just learned how to deploy systems that actually work in production.
Twenty years in. Still building. The next chapter is wide open.
Firm, collaborative, transparent. I lead with people, not above them. Anti-top-down, anti-bureaucratic.
Maker identity over title identity. Ship the thing.
Curious and evolving. Confident enough to change my mind the second someone has a better idea.
Fluent in both dev and client. Spent twenty years in the middle, turning requirements into code and code into answers. That's the job.
The opposite of how most shops run. Tell clients the hard thing before the bill goes sideways. Set expectations you can beat, then beat them.
Responsiveness is table stakes, not a feature. Real check-ins, real updates, no dodging. Every few years, a client asks me when I'm starting my own agency again.
Always thinking, always exploring, always questioning, always building.
Twenty years building things that ship. Architecture school. WordPress on the agency side. Fortune 500 engineering leadership. The trades, literally, on weekends. A few other lives in between that don't fit on a LinkedIn timeline. Most people look at all that and see a job-hopper. I see the same job in a lot of different uniforms.
One of those lives almost ended me. I lost both parents, then a stroke, then an MS diagnosis, then almost two years learning to walk again. Came back down 300 pounds. That's where the relentless comes from. When I tell a team I'll stay on something until it's actually working, I mean it the way you only can after you've had to rebuild yourself from the floor up.
Right now I'm running digital operations, shipping with autonomous agents, and cleaning up the kind of WordPress messes that twenty years of scar tissue lets you see coming. Web and platform engineering is the craft. But I don't hand a system off and disappear. I get close to the work, deploy where it actually helps, and stay on the hook until it holds in production. The architect in me can't ship something that doesn't stand up. That's the whole pitch.
I'm looking for small and medium businesses, founders, agencies, or high-trust teams that give a damn about craft. I am not anti-enterprise. I have run enterprise-scale work. But I am better used where the people closest to the problem can still make decisions, communicate honestly, and improve the system without getting buried in bureaucracy.
What it's all for
Three kids and a wife in Jacksonville. That's the whole why. The work. The rebuild. The relentless. Everything else is just how. Build something they can stand on. Build something that holds.
Twenty years, one pattern: build the platform, understand the operation, keep responsibility through launch.
Plumber Marketing Firm, Charlotte, NC (Remote)
Lovable Gazelle, Jacksonville, FL (Remote)
WebDevStudios, Jacksonville, FL (Remote)
Metro Jacksonville
Ox Nest Studios, LLC
Think Dynasty LLC, Williamsburg, VA
Smellycat Productions, Williamsburg, VA
Zubillaga Design, Florida
Foxtons North America, New Jersey
This is the work I want more of: production web engineering close enough to the business to see what actually needs to change, especially inside SMBs and high-trust teams that can still move.
WordPress, Astro, security response, delivery throughput
Own a production platform end to end: cleanup, environment hardening, release planning, performance. I want the systems other people are nervous to touch, and the room to make them boring and reliable.
Workflow mapping, operators, handoffs, launch ownership
The part most handoffs skip. I stay embedded through the messy first weeks in production, close to the operators and fixing what breaks on contact, until the system holds without me.
Agent workflows, orchestration, quality gates
AI inside real delivery, not a demo reel. Scoped agent workflows with review checkpoints and test handoffs, built so the output is something you'd actually ship to a client.
WordPress (Block Themes, REST API, WP-CLI, Full Site Editing, Custom Plugins), PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Python, Astro, MySQL, GraphQL
Workflow discovery, operator interviews, stakeholder translation, release planning, client-safe handoffs, launch ownership
Claude Code, Claude API, Anthropic SDK, OpenAI API, Autonomous Agent Development, Multi-Agent Orchestration, MCP (Model Context Protocol), Prompt Engineering, LLM Integration, Eval Loops, Quality Gates, API-Driven Automation
WP Engine, Vercel, Cloudflare, Docker, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Git, Nginx, Redis, Incident Response, Malware Remediation, Environment Hardening
Web platforms, operating workflows, AI systems, and the handoffs that make them usable after launch.
Main Site
The broader builder profile: web systems, engineering leadership, agent work, and the longer story behind the forward deployment pitch.
Visit →
Forward-Deployed Agency
Web and AI systems for trades operators. Built around the same premise as this page: understand the real workflow, then ship useful systems with enough quality control to trust the output.
Visit →
Portfolio & Blog
Projects and writing on agentic engineering, web development, and the difference between AI theater and production delivery.
Deployment Infrastructure
Local and cloud agent systems for coordinating specialized AI workers across scoped tasks, memory, review handoffs, and concurrent production delivery.
See it →Security at Scale
Forward-deployed into a live WordPress security problem: triage, compromised account cleanup, malware remediation, environment hardening, and the judgment to find what automated scanners missed.
See more →Agentic Delivery
Paperclip is one named example in a broader working range: OpenCode, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor-style agents, local models, open-source models, frontier APIs, OpenRouter routing, eval loops, and custom workflows that turn AI output into reviewable production work.
See it →Active in the WordPress community since 2008. Regular WordCamp attendee. Shipping real work on WordPress, cleaning up other people's WordPress, and teaching other developers how to do both.
Founded and lead Survivor Science, a 50+ member community for stroke and chronic illness survivors. Multi-channel content, podcast collaborations, peer support. From "Good Enough" to "Unstoppable AF". Navigating recovery together since 2022.
Coached 35+ technical professionals into effective project leaders and managers through structured coaching programs. 100% retention, 5 senior role promotions.
University of Miami
2001 to 2005
Five-year professional program, finished in four and a half.
Southern New Hampshire University
Expected May 2027
Concentration in management and operations.
Web platform work, forward deployment engineering, AI systems, or a hard operational mess that needs senior ownership. Email is fastest. Phone works.
Not the right fit if…
LinkedIn is the version they want. The site is the real one. Email is faster.
Jacksonville, FL
Employed full-time. Open to 1-2 side projects or a long-term role.