CTO · Co-founder · Engineering Partner
I build and ship zero-to-one AI platforms, from the first commit to the team that outlasts me.
I design the architecture, build it with the team, and own it all the way to production.
CTO-caliber, hands-on across the stack: I take products from an empty repo to production, then build the team that keeps them running.
Open to staff/principal eng + eng leadership conversations
Selected Work
AgencyOS
Engineering Lead · El Paso Labs
Durable agentic-workflow orchestration, tuned for delivery velocity.
- FastAPI
- LittleHorse
- Durable Execution
Problem
Clients needed agentic workflows shipped quickly, but the usual trade-off was brutal: move fast and accept brittle, non-deterministic pipelines, or move slow to earn durability and reliability. The mandate was to get both: production-grade reliability without sacrificing the speed clients were paying for.
Architecture
AgencyOS is a workflow-orchestration layer built on top of LittleHorse, a durable-execution engine in the same problem space as Temporal. The design treats durable execution as a first-class concern: long-running, multi-step agentic flows are modeled as durable workflows so that state survives restarts, retries are deterministic, and partial progress is never lost.
On top of that foundation I added durability primitives and an opinionated set of conventions that let engineers author reliable workflows without re-learning the distributed-systems failure modes each time.
Outcome
A production framework now powering multiple concurrent client engagements. The durable foundation produced qualitative gains in both delivery speed and reliability: workflows that would previously have been one-off, fragile scripts became reusable, observable, and resilient by default.
Needle Music
CTO · Needle Music
Graph-native social music discovery. Top 10 on the App Store, day one.
- Neo4j
- Kubernetes
- NestJS
- FastAPI
- Python
- Terraform
- AWS
Problem
Build a music-discovery and social-matching product where recommendations are graph-native, surfacing both the right tracks and the right people from how a listener actually behaves, not from shallow genre tags.
Architecture
I designed the Neo4j graph architecture that backs recommendations, deployed on Kubernetes for elastic scale. On top of it I built Music Match, a taste-embedding microservice in Python that matches user to user from listening behavior, and a production inference pipeline that generates the recommendation embeddings serving the graph.
Backend services spanned NestJS and FastAPI, with the full footprint provisioned as code via Terraform across AWS.
Outcome
Needle launched to Top 10 on the App Store on day one.
The Christmas launch
Launch day landed over the holidays, and traffic immediately outran the infrastructure while the team was scattered across the country for travel. I scaled the database and backend mid-flight, coordinated the team remotely, and stayed on-call through the holiday. The platform stabilized under load and the Top 10 ranking held. It was the clearest test of owning a system end to end: technical depth under pressure, with no one else able to take the keyboard.
Parabeac-Core
CTO · Parabeac
Open-source engine that converts Figma designs into responsive Flutter code, taking aim at the designer-to-developer handoff.
- Dart
- Flutter
- Figma
- Design-to-Code
Problem
The designer-to-developer handoff loses time and fidelity at every iteration: designers ship pixel-perfect Figma files, developers hand-translate them into code, and the two drift apart the moment either side changes. The goal was to automate that translation: turn a design file directly into clean, responsive Flutter code so design and development could move continuously.
Architecture
As CTO I led Parabeac-Core, the open-source conversion engine, written in Dart. It pulls a design straight from the Figma API and lowers it through a staged export pipeline emitting idiomatic Flutter.
Around the engine I also helped build the SaaS web app (frontend and backend) that wrapped the core into a product designers and teams could actually use.
Outcome
Parabeac-Core shipped as an open-source project with a real community behind it: ~600 GitHub stars across 30+ releases, and became the foundation that shaped how I think about closing the gap between design and engineering.
github.com/Parabeac/parabeac_core →Experience
-
2023-2026
CTO
Needle Music
Designed the graph-native recommendation engine and taste-embedding services behind a Top-10 App Store launch, and lead engineering for the platform day to day.
-
2023-2026
Co-founder, CTO
El Paso Labs
Founded and led the engineering org of an AI-native studio. Set technical strategy across concurrent client engagements, owning scope, architecture, and delivery against client KPIs, while building AgencyOS and other AI products in-house.
-
2019-2023
Software Developer → CTO
Parabeac
Rose from full-stack developer to CTO, specializing in the designer-to-developer handoff problem before moving into engineering leadership.
-
2019-2020
Software Engineer
Nestling
Built consulting MVPs for startup founders across EdTech, HealthTech; early Flutter advocacy.
Education
B.S. Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics
The University of Texas at El Paso
2017-2020
Capabilities
tree
-
workflow-orchestration/
littlehorse durable-execution -
graph-data/
neo4j cypher graph-modeling -
ai-ml-systems/
embeddings rag-pipelines inference-optimization recommendation-engines -
backend/
nestjs fastapi python typescript node -
cloud-infra/
terraform azure aws kubernetes -
full-stack-mobile/
react typescript flutter-dart cross-platform-mobile -
eng-leadership/
hiring-communicators async-first-teams technical-due-diligence
About
I'm a full-stack CTO who builds zero-to-one AI platforms. I write the first commit, design the data layer, ship the infrastructure, and then hire the engineers who carry it forward.
As co-founder and CTO of El Paso Labs, I built an AI-native engineering studio and ran several engagements at once: shipping products like Needle Music, where I was CTO, while providing technical leadership to client companies, authoring SOWs, planning high-level architecture, and keeping delivery aligned to their CTOs' KPIs.
I came to this through the designer-to-developer handoff problem, which led me to co-found Parabeac, and from there into scaling product engineering across a portfolio of startups.
I hold a BS in Computer Science with a Mathematics minor from UT El Paso.
If you're a recruiter or an engineer, I'm open to conversations, and I read every thoughtful message.
status: Open to staff/principal eng + eng leadership conversations