Résumé

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title: Résumé
description: "Staff engineer building AI-assisted developer tooling. Python, GCP, LLMs, and infrastructure automation."
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[Download PDF](/resume.pdf)

## Summary

Staff engineer building AI-assisted developer tooling and automations.  
I ship prototypes quickly and production code elegantly.  
Comfortable operating in high-pressure remote-first teams.

## Selected Work (high impact)

- - **AI cleanroom-design code reimplementations:** built a Pi extension that generates a functional spec from code and context and then creates a characterization test suite. The extension then passes the functional spec to a fresh instance to implement using the characterization test suite as a success metric. The result is extensible functional parity code unburdened by the original implementation.
- - **Async AI workflow orchestrator (triage -> implement -> assess):** built a multi-stage automation system that runs steps asynchronously, preserves context across phases, and uses heuristics to decide when to escalate to a human for guidance.
- - **AI code reviewer that improves code quality over time:** built an internal review system that evaluates changes against *human-authored guidelines* and uses challenge/verification mechanisms to reduce hallucinations, keeping suggestions actionable and preventing the codebase from "regressing to the mean".
- - **LLM-powered dbt model optimizer with fail-fast validation:** built a tool that proposes SQL optimizations, tests them against sampled datasets to catch issues quickly, and feeds concrete failures back into the LLM to iteratively repair until results reconcile.

## Technical Skills

- - **Languages:** Python, SQL, Bash, Ruby
- - **Infra:** Linux, Docker, networking, NGINX
- - **Cloud & Platforms:** GCP, AWS, Cloudflare, Tailscale
- - **Data:** dbt, Spark, BigQuery, warehouses at scale
- - **AI/LLM systems:** LLM benchmarking, context, tool workflows, guardrails
- - **Serving & runtimes:** vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp
- - **Ops & delivery:** CI/CD, observability
- - **Microcontrollers:** ESP32s, Raspberry Pis, PCBs

## Experience

### Shopify - Canada (Remote) (Jul 2019 – Aug 2026)

#### Staff Engineer, Data Warehouse Technology (Sep 2025 – Aug 2026)

- - Built tooling to refactor production AI slop, reducing production code by 80% while improving performance, testing, documentation, and extensibility.
- - Built an **LLM-powered dbt optimization tool** that fails fast on sampled data, validates semantic equivalence, and iterates automatically by feeding execution/validation failures back to the model.
- - Improved reliability by adding validation gates for AI-generated changes (language-aware checks, clearer failure states, and safer automation defaults).

#### Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Dec 2024 – Sep 2025)

- - Built an **async AI automation orchestrator** for data engineering workflows using a staged approach (triage -> implement -> assess) with **human-in-the-loop escalation** driven by heuristics and confidence checks.
- - Built an **AI code review system** that reviews changes against **human-authored engineering guidelines**, using challenge/verification techniques to reduce hallucinations and making suggestions one-click apply in GitHub.

#### Senior Analytics Engineer (Feb 2023 – Dec 2024)

- - Migrated core warehouse workloads from Spark to dbt on GCP.
- - Improved modeling practices, review workflows, and operational consistency across a large shared codebase.

#### Senior Data Scientist (Jul 2019 – Dec 2021)

- - Led a small team delivering forecasting and infrastructure planning recommendations.
- - Developed tooling to make load balance recommendations for our core infrastructure.

#### Parental Leave (Dec 2021 – Feb 2023)

- - Learned how to make a small human happy.

### CEO & Founder - Memair (Nov 2018 – Jul 2019) - Ottawa, Canada

- - Built a personal analytics product end-to-end (backend, frontend, infra, and ops).
- - Worked across Rails, Python, GraphQL, React, Flutter, and JavaScript on cloud + self-hosted infrastructure.
- - Site: <https://memair.com>

### Sailing Sabbatical (Sep 2017 – Sep 2018) - Canada/USA/Bahamas

- - Sailing [SV Catsaway](https://SVCatsaway.com) from Kingston, Ontario, to the Bahamas and back.
- - Produced a [YouTube series](https://YouTube.com/SVCatsaway) documenting our adventure, honing video communication skills.
- - Hacking on a few (mostly boat-related) [projects](/packages).

### Data Engineer - Shopify (Sep 2013 – Sep 2017) - Ottawa, Canada

- - Data modeling, reporting, experimentation, and ML support for early Shopify.
- - Worked primarily in Python/Ruby with Spark, Presto, and Rails.

### Data Specialist - Amnesty International (Mar 2012 – Sep 2013) - Sydney & Ottawa

- - Supporter database projects; Rails + SQL; operational reporting and process improvement.

### Communications - Australian Army (Jul 2004 – Nov 2012)

- - Peacemaking tour in [Afghanistan](/2020/07/publishing-afghanistan-posts/) 🇦🇫.
- - Peacekeeping tour in [Solomon Islands](/2009/02/tongans-belgiums-and-the-jungle/) 🇸🇧.

### Instructor • Upward Dog Yoga Centre (Jul 2014 – Mar 2020) - Ottawa, Canada

- - Teaching Acroyoga as part of [SmileyOm](https://smileyom.com).

## Projects & Self-Hosting

- - Home lab: servers, Docker workloads, monitoring, backups, and secure remote access.
- - Self-hosting (incl. Mastodon) and home automation (Home Assistant / ESP32).

## Writing & Speaking

- - Speaker: AI Tinkerers Toronto (Nov 2025) and many internal Shopify communications.
- - [Blog posts](https://gregology.net/posts/).

## Open Source & Patents

- - [Packages](https://gregology.net/packages/) (Python/Ruby/npm; mixed recency)
- - [Patents](https://gregology.net/patents/)

## Education

Leadership Principles - Harvard Business School Online (2026)

Bachelor’s Degree - Murdoch University (2008 – 2011, Remote)  
Focus: security / terrorism / counter-terrorism

## Security Clearance

- - Canada: Enhanced Reliability (valid through 2029)
- - Australia: Top Secret (lapsed)

## Citizenships

🇦🇺 Australian  
🇨🇦 Canadian  
🇮🇪 Irish (🇪🇺EU)  
🇬🇧 British  

## Principles

- - Improve the world according to my [Codex Vitae](https://gregology.net/codex/).
- - Use AI & data to solve interesting problems.
- - Lead great teams; keep learning; avoid being the smartest person in the room.

## Home Office

Connection:  

- - 3Gbps ⬆️⬇️ fiber Internet  
- - Ubiquiti networking equipment with ethernet to office  
- - 5G cellular & 8hr UPS redundancy

Residence: [Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada](https://goo.gl/maps/EkoPgT1Gz5cgUcTg6)  

- - 🏢 10mins to co-working spaces  
- - 🚗 15mins to 401 highway  
- - 🚊 15mins to Belleville Via Rail station  
- - ✈️ 2hrs to Toronto Pearson International Airport

Timezone: [Eastern Standard Time](https://time.is/ET) (UTC−05:00/UTC-04:00)  
Workable hours:  

- - **PST:** 04:00 - 13:05  
- - **EST:** 07:00 - 16:05  
- - **UTC:** 12:00 - 21:05  
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