Over my career, I've been lucky to work in academic, startup, and big tech environments on products big and small. Everywhere I've been, I've always found the greatest satisfaction in succeeding alongside people whoe are smart, diverse, and team players. Modern software development never happens in a vaccuum, and now, more than ever, effective, cohesive, and representative teams are essential to keep up with a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Relevance AI (2024 -)
I'm currently Director of Engineering at Relevance AI, a Sydney-based scale-up creating a unique platform that allows anyone to create powerful AI Agents, connect them to practically any data source, and thus automate and scale tasks that were impossible to do before.
I lead the engineering team at Relevance, overseeing team strategy, managing and developing individual engineers, and doing hands-on engineering and tech leadership. I'm scaling the team up, growing headcount whilst enplacing new engineering practices to enable our momentum to continue with growth.
Google (2015 - 2024)
Prior to Relevance, I spent nearly 10 years at Google in Sydney, working on Chrome and ChromeOS. Joining as a Software Engineer II (L4), I was promoted twice to reach Staff Software Engineer, whilst growing and managing a team of 20. I was awarded Best Manager at Google Sydney in 2020.
At Google, I was a foundational engineer for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), owning core and UI implementation of the Web App Manifest and its associated Web Standards on desktop and mobile. I spoke at Google I/O 2019 on Desktop PWAs, summarising many years of work from myself and many others across the world.
I was also a frequent contributor to Chrome Security, helping to deprecate Flash, define the standards for controlling access to powerful web platform features, and provide extensive web and app security consulting for the organisation.
On ChromeOS, my team owned the ChromeOS Apps Platform, and were responsible for detangling the complexities of running Linux/Android/Web/Chrome/Windows/Steam apps alongside one another on what was originally a operating system built on a browser.
In 2018, I was the Invited Speaker for the University of Sydney School of Information Technologies Graduation Ceremony, where I spoke about my journey to Google and passed on guidance to gradutes.
PhD in AI (2010 - 2015)
I completed a PhD in AI (Computational Linguistics) from 2010 to 2015 at the University of Sydney. My thesis focused on evaluating syntactic parsers based on formal grammars.
In 2012, I was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Postgradute Scholarship, and spent 2012-2013 visiting the NLP Group at UC Berkeley (just north of San Francisco). I continue to maintain my association with Fulbright, attending alumni and US Consulate events, as well as serving on interview panels assessing the next generation of Fulbright receipients.
