The headline
Business transformation technologist
Much of the last twenty-six years went to climbing the ranks of a telecom that kept reinventing itself around me. Four name changes, a dozen or more mergers, several departments and many friends. Along the way I learned a lot about myself.
Some people do crossword puzzles, others board games and the like. I played management games when I was young, and I've always been a systems guy, taking things apart to see how they work. That evolved from tinkering into engineering, and into chasing bigger and more challenging problems. Sometimes I chased them, and sometimes work and life brought them to me. Either way I've tried to keep growing, even during the lulls. You only get one quarter as far as we know, so I might as well rack up a good score while learning as much as I can.
This page chronicles the chapters and the lessons along the way. I wrote it as a window into the journey for friends and colleagues who want to understand where I'm coming from.
Where it started
Upstate New York roots
I grew up in a blue-collar town in upstate New York, quieter and more rural than the New York most people picture. My dad worked in a foundry, an engineer and a mechanic both, always building something with his hands. I think I got the itch from watching him.
Computers got me early. By middle school I already knew where I was headed. Math and science pulled just as hard, mostly because they explained the systems behind why the world works the way it does. Physics was the best version of that, two years of it, laws and formulas that break anything down into parts you can actually understand. I never really put that worldview down.
Service
The Navy: turning learning into a system
Upstate New York had been in a decades-long economic decline, and I knew I'd have to leave if I wanted a better life. Family tradition nudged me toward the Navy. At the end of my junior year I joined their Delayed Entry program to become an Electronics Technician.
Boot camp was my first airplane flight, followed by ET school in Orlando. Long days of classes, labs, and homework, intense but rewarding.
My first station was a year at Souda Bay, Crete, in the Mediterranean. From there it was back stateside for several years on the USS Thorn, a destroyer out of Portsmouth. This stretch is where I picked up my love of different cultures, adventure, and meeting new people. I still have great friends I met in the Navy.
The fiber-optic ring
In my last year on the ship, we installed one of the first fiber-optic rings on an East Coast destroyer, and I did the splicing and terminations by hand. It was mid-1999, the height of the telecom boom. That fiber experience was my ticket straight into a career.
The apprenticeship
Telecom operations: learning the whole machine
I left the Navy in 1999 and landed in a telecom repair center in a small Pennsylvania town. The company would change its name four times over the next twenty-six years. Sometimes we were doing the buying, sometimes we were the ones getting bought. My first years were operations, learned straight off the floor.
The repair center taught me the human half of the craft, like talking an angry customer down over the phone. It also started a habit I never kicked, building tools to fix whatever was broken around me. Our ticketing system went down constantly, so I built an offline version that kept the team working. When the folks above me couldn't see where problems were piling up, I built them a map.
My first taste of folding in an acquired company came early. I spent a week in Huntsville, Alabama with their team, untangling their customer records and matching them into ours. A small job, and a preview of much bigger ones to come.
From there it was lead, then supervisor, then manager of a provisioning team. Managing people turned out to be its own skill entirely, and nothing in the technical work had prepared me for it.
The integration years
Learning how the business fits together
Level 3 acquired us as part of a rollup of several companies in 2006, each one with its own leadership team, systems, and processes. Bringing it all together took months of meetings. My team ended up building a sales product visibility tool that standardized and consolidated each company's offerings into a single view.
That work later led to director of business process automation, redesigning core sales and ops processes with a team of process architects. At its core it was system design optimization, fun and challenging in other ways. It's where I learned that the technical part of the solution is sometimes the easiest to implement.
Next stop was finance, a whole new world for me. Opex, capex, netex, working closely with corporate development and strategy, M&A, data science. It was one of the most challenging and rewarding chapters of my career, and I got pulled into nearly every high-profile company initiative. A great growth chapter that pushed me more and more into high-stakes programs and platforms.
The build years
Platform engineering: running it at scale
In 2020 I moved into engineering, running it for our mid-market business, turning product ideas into things that shipped and kept working.
We made APIs the main way customers did business with us, a marketplace covering quoting, ordering, status, and ticketing.
My last role was running the Network-as-a-Service group. We took a ninety-day order-to-service cycle and turned it into something customers could switch on themselves in minutes. I ran engineering front to back, and we hit everything we committed to in a rough stretch for the company.
I enjoyed this phase more than I expected. Squeezing real results out of a lean team is a more interesting puzzle than throwing money at a problem. And most of my job became absorbing the turbulence so my people could keep working, and growing the next set of leaders who wouldn't need me around.
Now
AI: the newest tool in the box
Over my career the toolbox kept growing. Automation, business intelligence, machine learning, process engineering. AI is just the newest tool in the box, and I've never been the type to recommend a tool I haven't used myself.
So when I left Lumen at the start of 2026, I took the time to learn it properly, hands-on, before the next role. I'd watched the cloud wave go by from the shore once. I wasn't going to sit this one out too.
The timing finally worked. For years, four kids depending on me made staying put the responsible move, and it was. My youngest left for the Navy last summer, so for the first time in a long while my risk tolerance can match my ambition.
I founded AgentLayer and built the kind of systems I've always built, just with the new tool. The engineering underneath still matters more than the model, keeping it reliable, affordable, secure, and trustworthy enough that people actually use it.
Mostly I threw the problems from my own career at it. Folding in acquisitions, deciding what to sell and to whom, turning ideas into software. Every operating business has those functions, and AI has repriced them all. One small business I worked with took a twelve-week delivery workflow down to three days with the same team, which promptly exposed sales upstream as the new bottleneck, so we redesigned that next.
When I recommend AI now, or recommend against it, it comes from firsthand experience. Sometimes the honest answer is still a rule, a script, or a plain old model.
Off the map
Life along the way
The career map skips the stops that mattered most. Fourteen years of it happened in Denver, where my wife and I raised four kids, and where most of my actual growing up happened, because raising four kids will do that. A lot of how I lead (showing up, staying consistent, following through) started at home long before it showed up at work.
My dad was an engineer and a mechanic, always building things with his hands, so I wanted to take a stab at it myself: I built a teardrop camping trailer from scratch in my garage. My oldest wants it now, so we're building a replacement. And when it came time to choose where to live, we hitched up the teardrop, road-tripped Tennessee, and fell for Chattanooga at the first stop. Trailheads, a river, friendly people, and some of the best fiber connectivity in the country. It's the first place I ever chose for the life instead of the job.
Two of my sons serve in the Navy now, a generation after I did. I'm proud of them.