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Hands-on Engineering Leader

I build wallets, protocols, and onchain infrastructure that survive contact with reality.

Hands-on engineering leader with 15+ years building high-impact software — the last four deep in crypto wallets, DeFi, smart contracts, ZK, and blockchain platforms at Kraken, Tether, and Ignite. Before that: consumer products at scale for Booking.com and IKEA.

Get in touchSelected work

Kraken · Tether · Ignite · IKEA · Booking.com

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01

What I do

01

Wallets & self-custody

Self-custodial wallets, wallet SDKs, multi-chain transaction flows, custody and recovery models — at Kraken and Tether.

02

Blockchain platform engineering

Platforms processing all onchain activity across 70+ protocols: deposits, withdrawals, funding flows, unified onchain data.

03

DeFi & protocol integrations

DeFi primitives, cross-chain swaps, staking, DEX aggregation, IBC, and protocol-level integration work.

04

Smart contracts & account abstraction

Smart accounts, EIP-4337, ERC-7702, Solidity, and the contract infrastructure behind consumer wallets.

05

ZK & privacy systems

zk-rollups, zkVMs, zkTLS, Noir, Circom, privacy pools — applied privacy engineering, not just theory.

06

Product engineering at scale

100s of A/B tests, personalization, search, ranking, and reinforcement learning at Booking.com and IKEA.

07

Hands-on leadership

Small senior teams and multi-team orgs — while staying in the architecture, the code reviews, and the incident channel.

02

Selected work

NowCrypto Architect at UMO — advising on crypto architecture, wallet strategy, protocol integrations, custody models, and delivery for a crypto-financial product initiative.

W.01

Tether

Head of Engineering — Wallets · 2025 – 2026

A wallet SDK built so no one has to trust the vendor.

  • Built wallet.tether.io and the Wallet Development Kit: an open-source, modular SDK for production-grade multi-chain wallets without vendor lock-in.
  • Shipped 16+ open-source wallet modules and supported wallet implementations for large institutional and strategic partners, including Rumble Wallet.
  • Delivered Bitcoin, Lightning, and Plasma-based USDT transfers, with peer-to-peer foundations via Holepunch, flexible custody, and recovery models.
  • Hands-on across architecture, protocol design, SDK APIs, core modules, code reviews, and security reviews.

Bitcoin · Lightning · USDT · Holepunch · SDK design · Self-custody

MODULES (16+)WALLETSELF-CUSTODY · RECOVERY MODELS · OPEN SOURCEBITCOINLIGHTNINGUSDT / PLASMAP2P / HOLEPUNCH
fig. 01 — wallet development kit: 16+ modules, no lock-in
W.02

Kraken

Senior Engineering Manager · 2022 – 2025

The platform behind every onchain transaction at Kraken.

  • Built and led Kraken's Blockchain Platform: all onchain activity across 70+ protocols, powering deposits, withdrawals, wallets, funding flows, and unified onchain data.
  • Led engineering for the Onchain Business Unit — shipped Kraken Wallet, kBTC, Ink, and initiatives making onchain UX as simple as Web2.
  • Team scope: protocol development, smart contracts, privacy, DeFi primitives, account abstraction, ZK, platform infrastructure.
  • Owned production-critical systems where correctness, security, availability, observability, and incident response were table stakes.

70+ protocols · TypeScript · Rust · Solidity · Go · Kubernetes · Kafka

70+ PROTOCOLSPLATFORMDEPOSITSWITHDRAWALSWALLETS · FUNDINGONCHAIN DATAKRAKEN WALLET · KBTC · INK
fig. 02 — blockchain platform: every onchain transaction at kraken
W.03

Ignite (Tendermint)

Senior Engineering Manager · 2022

One wallet for a hundred sovereign chains.

  • Led engineering for Emeris: a cross-chain DeFi wallet and trading platform unifying the Cosmos ecosystem.
  • Delivered cross-chain swaps, staking, DEX aggregation, multi-chain asset management, and IBC-powered UX across Cosmos SDK zones.
  • Owned full-stack execution and infrastructure — including running the nodes.

Cosmos SDK · IBC · Go · TypeScript · Vite

HUBOSMOSISZONEZONEZONEAKASHEMERISIBC TRANSPORT · SWAPS · STAKING · DEX AGGREGATION
fig. 03 — emeris: one interface over many sovereign chains
W.04

IKEA

Engineering Manager · 2020 – 2021

Reinforcement learning that had to earn its keep.

  • Built and led teams for recommendations, personalization, and rewards using deep Q-networks and reinforcement learning.
  • Championed A/B testing and data-informed product decisions — model performance translated into measurable business outcomes, or it didn't ship.
  • Pushed infrastructure-as-code and engineering standards with Terraform, TypeScript, and Python.

Reinforcement learning · Deep Q-networks · A/B testing · Python · Terraform

DQN AGENTCUSTOMERRECOMMENDATIONREWARD / BEHAVIOREVERY MODEL CHANGE SHIPPED BEHIND AN A/B TEST
fig. 04 — recommendation loop: deep q-networks in production
W.05

Booking.com

Engineering Manager · Full Stack Engineer · 2014 – 2020

Hundreds of experiments on some of the most visited pages on the internet.

  • Led and built teams across Personalization, Search, Hotel Page, and Wishlist — running 100s of A/B tests that drove significant conversion uplifts on Booking's most visited surfaces.
  • Founding member of the Shanghai tech office, scaling a new engineering org for the Chinese market.
  • Later led Emerging Markets strategy, adapting product and business models for India and Indonesia.

Experimentation · Search & ranking · Conversion · Perl · TypeScript

TRAFFICVAR AVAR BSHIP / KILL100S OF A/B TESTS · SEARCH · HOTEL PAGE · WISHLIST
fig. 05 — experimentation engine: traffic, variants, decisions

EarlierFull-stack foundations: mobile frameworks and web apps for telecom and banking clients (Telfort, Vodafone) at Hewlett Packard, and client work at digital agency Deactro. 2010 – 2014.

03

Technical depth

Languages

Polyglot by necessity

TypeScriptJavaScriptRustGoSolidityPythonPerl

Frontend & product

Consumer-grade UX

ReactNext.jsViteTailwindDesign systemsConsumer UXMobile & web product

Backend & infra

Production operations

Node.jsKubernetesTerraformAWSGCPKafkaCI/CDObservabilityIncident response

Blockchain & crypto

Wallet to protocol

WalletsSelf-custodySmart contractsDeFiAccount abstractionEIP-4337ERC-7702Cosmos SDKIBCEthereumBitcoinLightningCross-chain systems

ZK & privacy

Applied, not academic

zk-rollupszkVMszkTLSNoirCircomCairoAztecStarkNetzkSyncPolygon zkEVMTornado CashPrivacy PoolsMoneroZcash

Data & ML

Decisions over dashboards

A/B testingExperimentationPersonalizationRecommender systemsRankingSearchReinforcement learning

04

Operating principles

  1. Correctness over cleverness

    In systems that move money, boring and right beats elegant and almost-right. Every time.

  2. Shipping over theorizing

    A production system teaches you more in a week than a design doc does in a quarter.

  3. Architecture that survives production

    Real architecture is what's left after incidents, scale, and key-person departures. Design for that.

  4. Small senior teams, high ownership

    Five people who own the outcome outbuild twenty who own a backlog.

  5. Product judgment plus technical depth

    Knowing what to build is half the job. The other half is knowing what it costs to keep running.

  6. Security and reliability are product features

    Users don't see your threat model — until the day it's the only thing they see.

  7. No hype-driven development

    The technology should be chosen after the problem, not before it.

  8. No architecture astronautics

    Abstractions must pay rent. If a layer doesn't earn its complexity, it goes.

  9. Meetings should often be docs

    Writing forces clarity. A sharp document beats an hour of people agreeing vaguely.

05

About

I've spent fifteen years building software products, the last four of them deep in crypto — first because the problems are hard, and second because the stakes are real: code that custodies money has no room for hand-waving.

I've managed multi-team orgs and I still read the diffs. I think the best technical leaders stay close enough to the work to feel when something is off — in the architecture, in the incident channel, or in the team.

I also run Nullifier Labs, a zero-knowledge research lab where I build open-source privacy experiments, zk apps, and infrastructure at the crossover of ZK and AI.

Outside of work: a reader across disciplines, slowly learning Mandarin, raising kids, and convinced most good engineering ideas already exist in history, economics, or physics — just wearing different clothes.

Currently reading & thinking about

blockchain ecosystemsgame theoryfinancial marketseconomicszero-knowledgeprivacyAIstartupsleadershiphistoryphilosophyphysicsmathematicsChinaMandarintravelsportsparentingscience fiction

06 — Contact

Building wallets, protocol infrastructure, privacy systems, or onchain products? Let's talk.

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