story.txt
§ 01before any of this, a code-day badge.
i’m 16. a friend drags me to a hackathon. we ship a mobile app that connects orphanages with foster parents. it wins Best in Show at Code Day Seattle 2019. months later i place top-15 nationally in mobile app development.
i learn the lesson that will run my life for the next decade: the gap between an idea and a working thing in someone’s hands is much smaller than people think.
COVID hits. the café down the block has a phone but no website.
the world goes online overnight. my city’s small businesses do not. brick-and-mortar shops that had never typed “domain registrar” into a search bar suddenly need an internet presence to survive.
i start cold-calling. cafés. salons. a yoga studio. nobody knows who i am. i don’t have an agency, a team, or a clue — just a laptop, a design eye, and a tolerance for getting hung up on. one yes is all i need.
one yes turns into JoDi Services.
i’m 17, doing 1am customer support calls between math homework. i write copy, ship websites, debug payment flows, learn what “net-30” means. by month six i’ve shipped a dozen sites and learned how to talk like a business owner before i’ve ever had a business card.
then bigger fish bite: COAR, a political-risk consultancy working in conflict-affected regions. a luxury architecture firm designing flagship spaces for Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Balenciaga. i’m a teenager from Seattle running invoices to a firm with Apple as a client. it doesn’t feel real, so i just keep shipping.
i collect the hard skills on purpose.
i go to UW for computer science, but i don’t stop building. i intern at Chewy (300% load-speed wins on a site serving 20M customers), at Tesla (rebuild the solar configurator; ship a national installer-finder used in 25+ markets), then land at AWS shipping features on frontier-AI safety systems and quietly building an autonomous engineering agent that 25+ engineers across 3 AWS teams now use to ship faster.
i wanted to know what “good” looked like across the spectrum: 10-person startup, 5-person product team, 5,000-person org. i now know.
i’ve been the customer’s engineer at frontier AI.
the role on paper says “software engineer.” the role in practice has been the closest thing AWS has to a forward-deployed engineer. for two-plus years at Bedrock Guardrails i’ve been the engineer in the room with 50+ enterprise customers — day-0 conversations about what Responsible AI even means for their product, design sessions to fit guardrails into their production systems, hands-on integration with their engineers, and ongoing point-of-contact long after launch. customers like a top US investment bank, a leading market-data & financial-information company, a global asset manager, a 100M-user consumer fitness platform, and regulated enterprises.
my most recent launch is a new public API — a guardrail for AI agents. i owned it end-to-end: scoping, design partners, cross-team alignment with science, PMs, security, and a half-dozen adjacent service teams, and the launch. earlier, i co-led the Standard Tier launch with two other engineers + research + product (+30% accuracy, +25% GPU utilization via cross-region inference, 60+ languages), and helped design + build the framework that onboards new foundation models so customers can use guardrails with them on Bedrock — cutting onboarding from17 days down to 1 and enabling 40+ model launches at re:Invent.
on the side i built Contour, an autonomous engineering agent now used by 25+ engineers across 3 AWS teams— ~25 hours of work a week saved per user. it started as a personal itch and turned into shared infrastructure.
but i miss the part where you cold-call a café. the part where there’s no playbook and no headcount, just a customer and a problem and you. i’m looking for that again — as a forward-deployed engineer or technical co-founder.