About
Systems Architect · Senior IC · Platform Builder
I've spent most of my career at one company — Voss Lighting, my family's business. That's easy to misread as a narrow tenure story. The more accurate version is that I spent 27 years moving through several generations of infrastructure, software, cloud, and business systems as the company grew from 90 employees in 8 Midwest locations to over 200 across 16 locations nationwide.
I was not handed a senior technical role. I started in 1999 as the Webmaster, earned more responsibility, moved into network administration and systems engineering, and became the person the business depended on for increasingly complex technical problems. The scope grew because the problems kept growing in scope and complexity, and I kept taking them on.
Long-Term Ownership
Over the years, that work expanded across domains most organizations split into separate teams: Windows infrastructure and Active Directory, WAN redesign and multi-location VPN architecture, ERP data migration from COBOL/C-ISAM systems, Exchange and email platform migrations, VMware virtualization on SAN infrastructure, ecommerce platforms, internal sales and operations tooling, pricing automation, and eventually a full AWS cloud migration.
Through each phase, I was not just building systems. I was operating them, migrating them, and living with the consequences of decisions made years earlier. I've seen what scales, what ages into technical debt, what users actually adopt, and what future migrations cost. That produces a different kind of engineering judgment than work measured only in launches, handoffs, and short project cycles.
Senior IC by Choice
When the company needed technical leadership, I moved into an IT Director role — managing people and teams across development, infrastructure, electronic ordering, reporting, and support. That experience taught me how technical decisions affect teams, budgets, and business outcomes.
It also clarified where I do my best work. I transitioned back to a senior IC Systems Architect role because my highest leverage comes from staying close to architecture, implementation, and operational problem-solving — not people management.
Current Work
Today, my work is centered on modern platform architecture: Next.js, Payload CMS, Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, and AI-assisted workflows.
I continue to build and operate VossLink, the internal operations platform I designed to replace fragmented manual workflows and give employees safer interfaces into business-critical systems. More recently, I rebuilt Voss Lighting's marketing platform into a structured content and lead-generation system and added an AI-assisted editorial pipeline integrated with the CMS.
Outside of Voss, my projects follow the same pattern: building platform primitives that turn messy operational problems into structured software systems. WaitFor explores distributed event coordination on Cloudflare Workers. Open Operational State defines a vendor-neutral way to represent machine-readable service health. NetLoc8 explores edge-native location intelligence and developer infrastructure.
Why Now
I love the work I do at Voss Lighting: the ownership, the freedom, the variety, and the ability to solve problems across software, systems, and operations.
At the same time, modern AI development tools have given me renewed energy for building. They have made larger systems feel more reachable, not by replacing engineering judgment, but by reducing the distance between an idea, an architecture, and a working implementation.
For my next role, I am looking for complex problems, meaningful ownership, room to build, and enough trust to make good technical decisions.
I am largely self-taught, and for more than three decades I have kept learning as the work, the tools, and the problems kept changing.