From the trading desk to the App Store.

I'm self-taught, and my route into engineering ran through a trading desk. At William Hill I priced sport for a living, got tired of the gap between what the desk needed and what it had, and started building the tools myself: an arbitrage calculator, a scheduling system, a live odds dashboard. Building for colleagues ten feet away is an unforgiving feedback loop, and it taught me to love it.

The desk led to Etainement, a ticket brokerage, where I spent three years building revenue systems: a portal for pricing our inventory against the live market, and the Chrome extension that connected it to Ticketmaster itself. Different market, same job: build the system that knows what things are worth.

Then I spent a year as the founder and sole developer of Prava, an AI faith journal for iOS. Every migration, every App Store submission, every support email: mine. There is no better forcing function for engineering judgment than knowing that nobody is coming to review the deploy.

Solo work taught me habits I didn't expect: writing decisions down because future-me is the only reviewer, shipping everything behind flags because rollback is a one-person on-call rotation, and holding a quality bar when no one is checking. What it can't teach is the thing I want next: the sharpening that only comes from strong colleagues. That's why I'm looking for a team.

The honest version of why a founder is job-hunting: I have spent the past year building Prava full time, and a product this young doesn't pay a salary. I have a family. I'm not winding Prava down and I'm not waiting for it to rescue me. It moves to a contained evenings-and-weekends scope, run with the same discipline it was built with, while my working day belongs to a team. And after a year of shipping alone, I genuinely miss the thing an office is actually for: people who are better than me at something, ten feet away.

Away from a keyboard: I run marathons, play tennis and piano, spend time with my family, and keep one day a week fully offline.