Open to work
Senior developer or development manager
Full-time, in Victoria or remote. A team that ships to real customers, where I can either build on AWS or lead the people doing it.
Story
I’ve been technical since I was six — building computers and websites long before either was a job. But my working life started with people, not code.
At 20 I started in technical support at West Corporation; six promotions later, by way of team lead, I was an operations supervisor with 120 direct reports and six managers. From 2007 to 2010 I sold consumer electronics at Future Shop and ran the floor as a manager on shift. I earned a business diploma in finance at Camosun College, which is still why I make the case for engineering work in cost and risk rather than elegance.
In 2009 I started LG Photography and ran it for seven years — commercial, product, and portrait work, plus everything else a one-person business needs: the portfolio, the website, and finding the clients. It’s still how I think about craft: get the light right and you need far less fixing afterwards.
In 2015 I joined AbeBooks, an Amazon company, in customer service. Over five years I moved into tier 2 support, trained new hires across offices, and became a technical account manager for Fillz — writing scripts for customers and running the daily priority meeting with the developers. I finished a web development diploma at Lighthouse Labs in 2019, and in 2020 crossed over to the engineering team in the same building.
Since then: Perl and Java for the BC Ministry of Health, mentoring at Lighthouse Labs, an Ethereum data product at Ether Capital, leading LLM training-data work at Scale AI, and two and a half years at GSTS on OCIANA — first as the lead engineer, then as engineering manager for a team that grew from ten to sixteen without losing anyone.
Since 2020 I’ve also volunteered with Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue out of Sooke, where I’m now a coxswain: the person in command of the boat and crew on a rescue. It turns out to be the purest leadership job I’ve had — clear goal, real stakes, and a crew that has to trust you.