Interim and fractional CTO
I step into organizations between leaders or ahead of growth, assess the technical and team situation, set delivery process, and hire or prepare the person who takes over.
What I do
I step into organizations between leaders or ahead of growth, assess the technical and team situation, set delivery process, and hire or prepare the person who takes over.
I build teams that own their process, tooling, and practices. I have taught Lean, XP, Agile facilitation, retrospectives, root cause analysis, and DevOps culture, including as TeamCatapult faculty and through Riot's internal courses.
I help engineering teams adopt LLM-assisted development with clear specs, measured results, and gates that stop bad output before it ships.
Engagements run as 30 day contracts, up to a year.
Selected work
Founder & CTO, 2026 to present
Task tracking designed for the ADHD brain, for iPhone, iPad, and Mac (SwiftUI, SwiftData). Launching fall 2026. Built with LLM coding agents working from my specs: I wrote every spec and about 30% of the code. I built the verification system that gates their work on tests, flags flaky tests, measures their accuracy with planted defects, and caught them fabricating benchmark numbers. The app passed App Store review.
Chief of Staff, 2024 to 2026
Managed the game engineers and web developers at the studio behind SWAPMEAT, a co-op roguelite shooter (Steam Early Access, October 2025). Ran marketing through the playtests and launch, owned employee development, and handled finance operations. I also built some tooling:
Partner and CTO, 2018 to 2024
Ran a Los Angeles technology consultancy building custom software, web, and e-commerce, and building software, product, and creative teams for clients including Playboy, Hello Sunshine, Angel City Football Club, Aster the Label, Beyond Yoga, to name a few. Worked on an ML-driven chatbot for Scout, a startup client.
Director of Engineering Development, 2014 to 2016
Coached engineering leadership and led DevOps transformations globally, helping enterprise customers like ABSA Bank, Standard Bank, and SunTrust to unlock their IT teams through Agile and Lean software development and infrastructure automation.
Engineering Manager, 2012 to 2014
Managed the release management and gameplay teams, including the team that built Berkshelf, a dependency manager for Chef, and owned their career development. Taught Riot's internal courses on DevOps, Lean, root cause analysis, and people development.
2007 to 2012
Built technology for the Americas business units, sports, and brand marketing, and worked with marketing to build Red Bull's first venture into esports. Led the team behind the private cloud and core IT for the Americas and brought Agile and infrastructure as code to IT, which cut deployment time and cost.
Recommendations
Jeff is one of the best people managers, advisors, and leaders I've ever known. He's my #1 source of insight when I need to think about my companies culture, engineering process, or human interactions. There is nobody I trust more to help build high functioning engineering teams.
Jeff had a profound effect on the Soylent engineering team. ... Within a few months, we had migrated from a messy system of random lists of engineering work to a kanban system with a regular cadence of stand-ups, task decomposition, code-review, pair-programming, retrospectives and inter-team one-on-ones. Work began making it to production faster and with higher quality.
Jeff is an exceptional coach and mentor. I am forever grateful to him for jumpstarting my engineering management skills, helping me to improve engineering at Datafold, and establishing a growth-oriented environment for our engineers.
Jeff is a leader who understands people and teams more than almost everyone I know. I've seen him in various work situations and I've been constantly amazed at how he is able to make people feel comfortable at work and build the sort of cohesion that leads to high performance.
Jeff has a unique approach to tackling the hard organisational problems. He thinks about these problems differently and explains them simply. His lessons, mentoring and coaching will stay with me for years to come.
Jeff's coaching has helped create a philosophy and system for my role as COO that I can hang my hat on and reliably use for consistent results.
Writing and talks
ParaNote engineering notes, Sep 18, 2026
Where one thought ends
ParaNote engineering notes, Sep 11, 2026
How Para Moves
Riot Games culture talk, 2013
Wrong Way to be Right
Podcast
Arrested DevOps, Episode 38: Career Management
Valarin Perspective podcast E20
How to Get People on Board with Your Ideas
About
Engineering leader for 30 years, across telecom, consumer products, games, and consulting. Undergraduate in communications at Santa Monica College. 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu black belt and instructor.
Contact