The long version, in order

I’m a software engineer in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I started writing code in a high-school Java class in 2018, discovered I could put things on the App Store, and never really stopped. Most of what I do now sits somewhere in machine learning: vision models, OCR, and the unglamorous engineering that makes them usable on real, messy input rather than a clean benchmark.

That work now runs through Vantix Strategies, the firm I founded in January 2026: a boutique group of forward deployed engineers who embed inside client teams and ship production AI systems with the client owning the IP. In August 2026 I left my full-time job to run it full time; I’m now Director of AI Engineering at Umbrage, a Bain & Company subsidiary.

The full-time job was UnitedHealthcare. I spent a year there as an AI Engineer, building an observability platform spanning legacy and cloud-native systems and a benefits API that lets internal agents retrieve member data in natural language through MCP servers. Then I was picked as one of 15 engineers, out of roughly 13,000 in UnitedHealth Group Technology, to start the company’s forward deployed engineering practice — embedded with the business units themselves, which turned out to be good practice for doing the same thing on my own.

Outside of that I run, far enough that it requires planning rather than enthusiasm, and I ski, hike, and play a fair amount of pickleball, usually somewhere I haven’t been before. The ultras in particular are not a sideline to the engineering. A hundred-mile race and a multi-year project reward the same narrow skill: staying with something whose payoff is a long way off, and managing yourself well enough to still be functional at the end.

I studied computer science at the University of Minnesota: a BS in 2024, then a master’s alongside full-time work, finished in 2025. Before all that I built apps for my high school, won the Congressional App Challenge for Minnesota’s third district, and spent an unreasonable amount of time on a 3D iOS game.