links

work experience

technical program manager @ Hypha Worker Co-operative

(Jan 2022 - present)

  • Identifying customer needs, analyzing risks in our market, making strategic decisions about the direction of our test network (and sometimes the larger Cosmos Hub product too)!
  • Liaising between the core development team, my own test team, other product teams, and the end users to improve communication and awareness between these parties. I speak ‘customer’, ‘engineer’, and ‘executive’ depending on who needs to hear what I’m saying.
  • Removing obstacles for my team by ensuring they have access to clear architectural design records, documentation, and experts who can support their work.
  • Catching problems before they manifest by keeping an eye on other work in our ecosystem and using systems thinking skills to forecast and prepare for interactions between many different cross-functional teams and product dependencies.
  • Promoting the value of my team’s work and securing our funding via a decentralized governance process on the Cosmos Hub blockchain in which 180+ node operators publicly vote on our funding each year (2024) (2025).
  • Running and publishing retrospectives on security and emergency events impacting our test network and the larger Cosmos Hub blockchain (example).
  • Best things I’ve written and done here

operations and governance lead @ Hypha Worker Co-operative

(Jan 2022 - present)

Everyone at Hypha performs both client-facing technical work (e.g., my technical program management work) and internal-facing operational work for the co-op. This role covers the breadth of my operational and internal work for my co-op.

  • Operations Lead: Building workplace systems and policies to support employees and the ability to work with clients (hiring, onboarding, insurance, benefits, salary review, peer feedback, conflict transformation, vacation, reviewing and signing contracts).
  • Governance Lead: Ensuring that the members of our co-op benefit from their membership in appealing creative ways (e.g., sharing in labour patronage, opportunities to do fulfilling work), writing and interpreting bylaws and membership policies.
  • Secretary of the Board: Performing the usual oversight and accountability functions of a board member, as well as taking minutes, ensuring clear communication between the board and the co-op, and often leading board meetings on behalf of the President.
  • Best things I’ve written and done here

software engineering t.a @ University of Waterloo

(Sep 2019 - Dec 2021)

Students in Management Engineering take 4-5 software courses in a sequence to learn computer programming, algorithms and data structures, database and software design, and finally how to work in a team to build a complete software product. These teaching assistantships with Dr. Mark Smucker involved teaching each course several times and adjusting the curriculum and teaching methods to better fit within the sequence of courses students would be taking.

  • MSCI 342 Principles of Software Engineering: 3rd year engineering students learn how to work as a team to efficiently design and build software that works correctly and solves a customer’s problem. Topics include software development processes, requirements gathering and analysis, software design, specifications, estimation, scheduling, revision control, software testing, deployment, and team behavior.
  • MSCI 245 Databases and Software Design: This course introduces students to software systems that use a relational database management system (RDBMS) for data storage. One focus of this course is multi-tier software architectures, such as websites and other software as a service (SaaS) systems. Students will learn common software concepts such as design patterns, and modelling processes, objects, logic, and data. Students will learn how to organize data in a RDBMS and how to interact with the database using the structured query language (SQL).

co-op positions

Engineering students at the University of Waterloo complete seven 4-month paid co-op terms throughout their degree. I worked in a variety of roles, specializing in supply chain and software product management.

software and product management

supply chain

  • North (formerly Thalmic Labs, now acquired by Google) (Sep 2018 - Dec 2018)
  • Roche (Jan 2018 - Apr 2018)
  • PepsiCo (May 2017 - Aug 2017)

education

Management Sciences and Engineering is the intersection of operations research, information systems, and organizational design. In this cross-disciplinary program, I learned systems thinking and problem-solving skills that can be applied especially well to complex technical systems which interface directly with humans.

  • MMSc (Masters of Management Sciences) - University of Waterloo (2021)
  • BASc in Honours Management Engineering, Option in Statistics - University of Waterloo (2019)