A little bit about me.

Origins

I was born and raised in the southeast suburbs of Victoria, Australia — a place almost perfecting the ‘surbubia as giant nursery’ vision of urban development.

Brighton Beach, Melbourne
Brighton Beach, Melbourne — famous for its colorful beach boxes.
Bentleigh Bird's Eye View
A bird’s-eye view of Bentleigh, the suburb where I grew up in Victoria, Australia.

Until I found programming I could usually be found at Brighton Beach, our local spot. You can buy one of those ‘beach boxes’ pictured for around $300k. The most expensive deck chair and jet ski storage you can find. Fortunately, broke uni kids can use their decks for free.

Day-by-day

Currently, I help build modal.com, AI infrastructure that developers love. I joined in August 2022 as lucky #7. At the time the company was pre-PMF and pre-revenue, but full of shockingly capable engineers with whom I still enthusiastically struggle to keep up with.

In August 2025 Modal announced its $1.1B Series B, and by year end we’d hit 70+ people and 9-figure ARR.

(Scroll down to see some personal dashboard stats powered by Modal!)

Portugal Offsite
Modal Office View
The team is bigger than this now, but in that photo my eyes are closed!
This office view will never get old.

I have been at Modal for almost 3.5 years now, and these days do mostly engineering management. Necessarily, my coding pace has slipped a bit, from #2 committer to around #5. Alas.

Where

Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn

Today, I live in NYC. When I’m not working, you can find me walking a new part of the five boroughs, or stopped in a park to read. There’s a lot to love in this vast, grubby city, and I hope to see all of it by foot.

More specifically, I live in East Village. It’s great, but my paradise is still Fort Greene and I’ll move back there in the midyear.

Past

I spent 3.5 years at Canva, joining when it had almost 300 engineers and leaving when it had about 1,800. I joined as a graduate, hobbling around with a broken leg, and ended up as team lead of ML Platform. The whole way through I grew under the mentorship of Greg Roodt.

When not doing Data or ML Platform stuff, I spent quite a bit of time working with the Bazel build system, and helped maintain the Python rules for Bazel. It’s the future, get on it.

Previous to Canva I worked at Zendesk on their Answer Bot machine learning product, and at Atlassian as an application developer intern in their reliability/monitoring team.

Life

2025 was capped off with a proposal to Keeli, my girlfriend of 8 years. We’re pretty excited about what’s next.

A litore ad astra.

Proposal