I didn't take the traditional CS path. I studied computer and network security at Dakota State. Security teaches you to think like an attacker. Find the weakest point. Understand how systems actually fail, not how they're supposed to work.

That's the same skill that makes a good engineer. It's also what makes someone effective at the principal level: most of my work now is figuring out what's actually wrong, then getting entire organizations to fix it together. The technical debt everyone's normalized. The feature roadmap that's solving last year's problem. The architecture decision from three years ago that's strangling everything built on top of it.

I spent the last decade at places like Shopify, Pinterest, and OpenTable. Big companies with thousands of engineers. At that scale, writing code is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to build, and getting dozens of teams to build the same thing.

I've killed features that would have taken months because I proved we could solve the problem differently. I've shipped in six weeks what got quoted six months because I reframed the question before anyone opened an IDE. I've done it by staying hands-on. Leading from the front with ICs, shifting culture one codebase at a time.

That's what I mean when I say I'm a product engineer. Not someone who waits for specs, but someone who's in the room when we decide what they should be. Still close enough to the work to know if we're getting it wrong.

I'm also a search and rescue volunteer. Red Rock Search and Rescue, out of Las Vegas. SARTECH certified, which means I'm qualified to be the one they send when someone's hurt or lost. Early mornings, late cold nights, long hot days. Urban searches and wilderness alike. Hikers who didn't come back, off-roaders who overestimated their rigs, tourists who underestimated how fast the sun sets in a canyon.

It's not a hobby I tack onto my bio to seem interesting. It's probably the most important thing I do. Everything else I build (compensation systems, ad platforms, creator tooling, access control) might make someone's job easier or help a company grow. SAR means sometimes someone goes home to their family because we found them in time. And when they don't, we bring closure.

The SAR motto is: "So that others may live." I take that literally.

The parallels to engineering are obvious. Assess. Prioritize. Execute. Figure out where someone actually is, not where they said they'd be. Work with incomplete information and make decisions anyway. Stay calm when the stakes are high.

I've lived a lot of places. South Dakota, the Twin Cities, the Bay Area. Landed in Vegas. Best national parks, hardest offroading and camping, and a desert that's actively trying to kill me. I spend most of my free time in it. Overlanding, wrenching on whatever needs fixing, dragging my wife to one more trail. Sometimes I trade the desert for the ocean and go diving instead. The dogs have learned to sleep through the trip planning.

I have opinions about software architecture, about how teams should work, about what makes a good product. I'm wrong sometimes. But "I don't know, let's find out" beats pretending to know every time.

If you want the formal version, my resume has the dates and titles. But the short version: I find what's broken (systems, teams, assumptions) and I fix it. Ad platforms at Shopify. Access control at Pinterest. Compensation product architecture at Lattice. Or someone lost in the desert.

Same skill. Different stakes.