Background

I’m a Staff Software Engineer with over ten years of experience designing and scaling critical systems that power content creation and delivery. At The Washington Post, I’ve led the development of high-impact tools used by journalists and editors every day, including large-scale email infrastructure, personalization platforms, and emerging AI-powered newsroom assistants. I thrive in roles where I can bridge engineering and editorial needs, mentor teammates, and bring clarity to complex, cross-functional projects.

Mission

I build technology that empowers journalists to tell better stories, faster. My mission is to craft scalable, resilient, and human-centered systems that improve how news is created, personalized, and delivered. Lately, I’ve focused on integrating AI into newsroom workflows—not to replace editorial judgment, but to enhance it. Whether leading infrastructure overhauls or prototyping new editorial tools, I aim to create software that supports truth-seeking in a rapidly evolving media landscape.

Backend AWS Serverless ∙ Java ∙ Mode

Frontend   React ∙ Typescript

Languages   Java ∙ JavaScript ∙ Python

AI & ML    RAG ∙ Agents ∙ Fine-tunning ∙ LLM QA

Databases    MongoDB ∙ Elasticsearch ∙ SQL

DevOps  AWS ECS ∙ Docker ∙ Kupernetes ∙ CDI

Security    DDOS Testing ∙ Auth ∙ Compliance

Web Delivery  Akamai ∙ AWS CloudFront ∙ Email

EXPERIENCE

The Washington Post — Staff Software Engineer, Creator XP | 2020 - present

  • Led technical design and planning for "First Edit," an AI-powered editorial assistant for Creator Tools, intended to integrate LLM-driven suggestions into newsroom workflows.

  • Developed benchmarking methodologies using curated datasets to objectively evaluate AI performance, supporting department-wide adoption of machine learning capabilities.

  • Redesigned the backend for the email system that delivers The Washington Post’s newsletters and alerts. Reduced newsletter send times by 75% and enabling personalization for audiences over 9 million, ensuring stability and performance through three major election cycles.

  • In 2024, resolved 68 critical infrastructure vulnerabilities and led proactive load testing during election periods to ensure security and operational resilience across Creator Tools systems.

  • Led a cross-functional committee of ICs and managers to develop a new skills matrix and leveling criteria for a 100+ person engineering department, fostering transparency and consistency in career development.

Genospace — Principal Software Engineer | 2014 - 2020

  • Lead architect directing and reviewing the work of a twenty person engineering department. Managed technology roadmap for a healthcare research and data analytics platform. In 2020, the platform was used to build HCA Healthcare’s COVID-19 registry.

  • Developed an extract, transform, load (ETL) pipeline of microservices to replace a monolithic web app. Reduced month-long data loads to a single day while reducing AWS costs by 25%.

  • Defined process for software design, development, documentation, and automated testing. This led to our first Food and Drug Administration (FDA) software validation certification, allowing us to submit real world evidence (RWE) for drug development.

Genospace — Senior Software Engineer

  • Researched and developed a near-real-time search and analytics platform to support more than 2 million unique patients with over 8 billion documents.

  • Tech lead for a cross-functional Scrum team, managing the delivery of multiple web apps. Created technical designs; broke down, planned and delegated tasks; and peer-reviewed others' work..

Reactor Labs — iOS Developer | 2013 - 2014

  • Lead iOS developer of the iPhone app Winston; a speech-enabled conversational assistant that summarized its users’ social feeds and news interests. App received a 4+ star rated app with 74,000 downloads, was featured on the main page of the App Store under ‘Bite-Sized News’ during the week of Feb. 7, 2014.

Institute For Telecommunication Sciences — Electronics Technician | 2012 - 2013

  • Built an open-source web app with a cross-disciplinary team of visual/sound engineers and psychologists. The app performed subjective Quality of Experience testing on the effects of degradation in video and sound quality on comprehension. Findings were used to set industry standards for streaming media on the web.

PATENTS & PUBLICATIONS

Genospace Trial Match Patent | 2020

  • O’Connor, Niall, Mickey Alan Correll, Kathryn Hopkins, McGill, Luke Connors and Daniel Schlauch. Data Integration Using Graph Structures. U.S. Patent Application 16/298,748, filed Mar. 11, 2019, issued Feb. 18, 2020

Web-Enabled Subjective Test Research Tools | 2014

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Boston Pride Guide — Associate Editor (Volunteer) | December 2019 - June 2020

  • Associate editor for the 2020 Boston Pride Guide, the official annual publication of Boston Pride. Responsible for recruiting contributors, selecting pieces for the publication, and editing articles.

Boston Pride Committee — Festival Chair (Volunteer) | October 2017 - June 2020

  • Led a team of more than 70 volunteers to produce the Festival, New England’s largest LGBTQ Festival. In 2019, the event was attended by over 150k community members and hosted over 120 exhibitors that provide health, growth, education, and diversity services to the LGBTQ+ community.

Freedom for All Massachusetts: Yes on 3 Campaign — Volunteer Lead | June - November 2018

  • Organized and trained volunteers in voter retention canvasing. In 2018, Massachusetts voters faced the first-ever statewide popular vote on protections for transgender people from discrimination. With our help, voters in Massachusetts upheld the existing nondiscrimination law.

EDUCATION

University of Colorado, College of Engineering — Boulder, CO | May 2014
B.S. Computer Science, Emphasis in Software Engineering

  • Dean’s List College of Engineering: Spring 2014, Fall 2013, Spring 2013, Fall 2012, Spring 2012, Fall 2010 - Spring 2014