Joined during pandemic (despite little domain knowledge) to modernize digital identity infrastructure. Left four years later leading a fully-remote team of twelve. We took Kount 360's identity layer - identity proofing, account protection, and consent management - from a Vue.js demo to a platform built for Equifax's full consumer base, productized as a gateway to other Equifax services. My success came from seeing the forest through the trees: clearing organizational and political obstacles so the team could deliver the vision.
Highlights
Hard-won lessons
Ship to real users early. The platform we built has gone on to drive real revenue through paths we didn't predict, but it took years instead of months because compliance and reorgs blocked feedback channels. The lesson I'm taking into climate work: shifting security left doesn't come before fitting the product to the market.
Identity Proofing platform
Co-designed the product end-to-end with the product owner, distilling the vision into SDK-driven OAuth/OIDC and Identity Proofing flows with 50+ permutations (NIST 800-63 compliant). I wrote many of the core services that are in production to this day.
Stack: Go, TypeScript, Kotlin, OpenAPI, gRPC, NIST 800-63
Next-generation auth
Wove Passkeys/WebAuthn and DPoP into a single sign-on flow alongside fraud mitigation and consent management. Auth, fraud, and consent are often injected as disparate functions; we unified them into a single embeddable experience.
Stack: WebAuthn, Passkeys, DPoP, OIDC
Building and leading the team
The team rebuilt around me after the proof-of-concept. I held that continuity through reorgs, grew with the team to twelve engineers (~$2M annual budget), and by the time we shipped I had been running hiring, strategy, and cadence for years.
Most of the visible product wins rested on dev-experience foundations laid in those first two years. I set internal standards for API contracts and code generation (OpenAPI, gRPC), built onboarding tooling that brought new engineers from zero to first PR in their first week, and wrote the first integration test suites in Cypress and Playwright.
On the operations side, I moved CI/CD off Jenkins onto Kount's Terraform/Kubernetes platform, stood up DataDog for monitoring and alerting, and built out a front-end design system in Storybook. Plaid and Yodlee integrations rounded out the data layer.
Stack: GitLab, Terraform, Kubernetes, DataDog, Storybook, Plaid, Yodlee
Navigating the M&A
The Equifax–Kount M&A cut across everything we were building. We refactored all our infra (GCP→AWS, GitHub→GitLab, Jenkins→Terraform, and split the monorepo) and brought the product through enterprise security review.
The merger reset the security floor across every product. New compliance requirements were blocking us from real customer feedback, so we shifted compliance left: I worked with the cloud platform team to bake new standards into the platform itself. This is the period when I shifted from coding to strategy and cross-functional collaboration.
Stack: AWS, GitLab, Terraform, Kubernetes, NIST 800-63, Shape Up
Shipping through uncertainty with Shape Up
My director introduced me to the Shape Up methodology when conventional workflows failed amid moving goalposts. Our success with it became a story that leadership tasked me to evangelize across other teams.