About Me

The Short Version

I'm a Solutions Engineer who builds things - not just demos them. Over 19 years in tech, I've worked across the full spectrum from technical support to SE leadership, but my sweet spot is the intersection of deep technical work and business outcomes.

At Twingate, I work across the SE lifecycle for SMB and mid-market customers: scoping architectures, running technical evaluations, building proof-of-concept deployments, and creating the tooling and documentation that makes it all repeatable. I've been the technical lead on thousands of customer engagements contributing to millions in net-new ARR. When I saw gaps in our tooling - containers that needed better health checking, IoT devices that couldn't run agents, deployment guides that didn't exist yet - I built the solutions myself. One of those projects was forked by Twingate's official Solutions org and is now used across the company.

The Career Arc

Before ZTNA, I spent 15 years in fintech and payments. At Jaris (embedded finance), I was the first SE hire - I built the entire demo platform from scratch using Python, Flask, and PostgreSQL, then ran every technical evaluation and partner implementation. At Bambora/Beanstream (payments processing), I progressed from technical support supervisor through project management to senior integration specialist and eventually team lead, working with enterprise partners and financial institutions on payment platform integrations.

The thread that connects all of it: I'm the kind of solutions engineer who builds things. Custom containers, deployment scripts, automation tooling, technical documentation - not just demos and handoffs. Several of my projects have been adopted by Twingate's official Solutions org and are used by customers and partners in production.

Staying Hands-On

I stay hands-on technically in a way that's unusual for someone at the senior SE level. I run a homelab with Proxmox, Linux servers, and Docker. I write Python, Bash, PowerShell, and SQL regularly. My GitHub has public projects ranging from custom Docker containers to network gateway configurations to notification systems. I believe the best SEs are the ones who can drop into a terminal and actually solve the problem, not just describe it on a whiteboard.

Location

Based in Victoria, BC, Canada.

What's a "Sphexi"?

The word comes from Starflight, a game originally released in 1986. My copy came on two 3.5" floppy disks, and saving your game changed the actual executable files - if you messed up your main copy, it was gone forever.

In the game, Sphexi was the homeworld of one of the alien races and where you had to collect the Crystal Orb to beat the game. I can't remember why this name stuck with me over all the others, but it did. I started using it as a screen name in the late 1990s, registered sphexi.com around 2003-2004, and it's been my main domain ever since.