The Journey So Far

I’m the tech lead for the physical networking platform behind Google Distributed Cloud, working with a team that includes both software engineers and network engineers.

At the staff level, the main lesson I’m still learning (loudly) is how to scale beyond myself: transferring knowledge, delegating real ownership, and raising quality across the entire team — not just in the code I personally touch.

I was the tech lead for the Google Distributed Cloud network engineering team during a large re-architecture.

This is where the scope really expanded: more cross-team collaboration, more influence work, and more architecture that turns into quarters of execution for multiple teams.

This was my entry point at Google, working on the Google Distributed Cloud physical networking platform.

It was a big shift from a consulting background (where a lot of the work is individual output) to being part of a product engineering team. The first phase was getting my footing: learning the team, the product, and how the organization actually ships.

Good Spirits is intentionally not a “tech project.” It’s an exploration of founder mindset in a non-tech market: consumer packaged goods, in one of the hardest and highest-barrier-to-entry categories — alcohol.

It’s been a forcing function for fundamentals that software sometimes lets you postpone: taste, consistency, distribution constraints, and building something people will actually buy.

I was the go-to person for anything software or automation — especially where it intersected with infrastructure and delivery.

One representative build: a full-stack engineering sales CMS with iOS and Android apps, backed by microservices on Kubernetes, worker queues, content view/watch metrics, and a roadshow-focused front end for large-format touchscreen displays (plus lead capture).

This role was mostly delivery (80%+) — the high-pressure or strategic projects where execution quality mattered and timelines were real.

The team lead portion (20%) was about keeping the quality bar consistent across projects, improving delivery process and billables, and being an escalation point. I also jumped into pre-sales when needed.

The leadership lesson I carried forward: not everyone will deliver to my exact standards, but they can still get the job done with satisfied customers. My way isn’t the only way — and learning to influence up the management chain matters as much as influencing down.

Marine Corps framing aside, this was hands-on ownership of medium-sized enterprise infrastructure: networking, enterprise applications, and domain infrastructure.

This period taught me more lessons about myself and other people than I could count — some good, some bad, some lifelong. Self-reliance and competence became armor.