That meant shipping player SDKs onto every screen in the living room, then moving into the pipelines behind them — and now building CNN's data platform at Warner Bros. Discovery. I still ship apps end to end — design, client, backend, infrastructure — because building is how I stay honest about what I ask teams to do.
Lately that has meant shipping AI features that have to work on someone's phone: a plant-care assistant running on Apple's on-device model with no server behind it, a language model running in the browser, and an agent pipeline that reviews my own pull requests before they merge.
B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering · The University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
2011 – 2012
iOS Developer · Aeron Agency
Learned Objective-C from scratch and built a mobile practice from nothing: seven apps in eight months, past five thousand downloads.
2012 – 2014
Mobile Engineer · Giftboard
An iOS app for a social platform built around gift exchange — its payment flow, and the DynamoDB schemas holding profiles and card data.
2013
Lead iOS Developer · MaxMedia
iPad catalog apps for Home Depot and Tempur-Pedic, on Core Data — and real time in Instruments chasing the leaks that decide whether a catalog feels good to scroll.
2013 – present
Warner Bros. Discovery
Thirteen years and six roles at one company — from writing the player SDKs to running the data platform behind them.
Software Engineer I
Feature work, bug fixes, and release support across the streaming apps — learning a codebase that had to behave identically on a dozen different screens, and a release process where a bad build reaches millions.
Software Engineer II
Shipped video player SDKs across a large roster of high-traffic streaming apps, and designed the authentication framework behind content security, free previews, and single sign-on on Xbox, Fire TV, and Chromecast.
Senior Software Engineer
Became the mobile expert internal teams and outside contractors leaned on, and watched live sports go out in real time to keep playback honest under load. Started mentoring the engineers coming up behind.
Staff Software Engineer
Extended the cross-platform SDKs onto Roku and React Native — dynamic ad stitching, DRM, live and VOD playback, DVR, analytics — and halved deployment times with CI/CD on GitHub Actions and Jenkins, plus the infrastructure-as-code work behind it.
Manager, Software Engineering
Ran the team behind the pipeline that turns viewership, advertising, instrumentation, and video telemetry into analytics and recommendations — alongside streaming security across hundreds of cable providers and first-party collection built to hold up to privacy regulation.
Senior Manager, Data Engineering
Building CNN's data platform across several teams: client-side collection, the pipeline that carries it, and the modeling at the far end — the layer the rest of Warner Bros. Discovery reads from.
Side projects
Apps I've built end to end
Each of these is designed, built, and operated by me — native clients, backend, infrastructure, and brand — and ships under Taylab, my one-person studio. One is in the App Store; three are on the way, the newest of them built for the screen in the living room.
Data engineering leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery
I lead data engineering teams building the platforms behind streaming at global scale.
Scope and outcomes only — no proprietary internals.
Data platform
The pipeline behind what viewers see next
problem
Viewership, advertising, instrumentation, and video telemetry all arrived as separate streams from every platform the apps run on — valuable individually, far more valuable joined, and useless to product teams in that raw state.
approach
Led the hybrid team that designed and built the pipeline aggregating those streams into one analytics-ready foundation, with observability built in rather than bolted on — and owned the path end to end, from what gets collected on the client to what lands in the warehouse.
impact
One source of truth feeding advanced analytics and the recommendation engines that drive user engagement.
Streaming telemetryAnalyticsTeam leadership
Security
Authenticating premium video across hundreds of providers
problem
Premium streaming content has to reach exactly the people entitled to it — across hundreds of cable providers, each with its own identity system — while still letting anyone sample a free preview.
approach
Built the video streaming security layer end to end: DRM, authentication, and authorization spanning that provider landscape, plus an authentication framework carrying single sign-on across Xbox, Fire TV, and Chromecast.
impact
Content stays protected at provider scale, free previews still convert, and viewers sign in once instead of once per device.
DRMAuthenticationSSO
Platform engineering
One media stack, every screen in the living room
problem
Each new streaming platform threatened to become its own implementation of playback, ads, and analytics — the kind of duplication that multiplies bugs and slows every release that follows.
approach
Expanded the cross-platform SDKs onto Roku and React Native so one media stack covered more surfaces, handling dynamic ad stitching, DRM, live and VOD playback, DVR, and analytics. Rebuilt delivery around CI/CD on GitHub Actions and Jenkins, and led the infrastructure-as-code work behind it.
impact
Deployment times cut in half, with playback behavior consistent across platforms instead of drifting per implementation.
RokuReact NativeCI/CDInfrastructure as code
Privacy & growth
First-party data that regulators and customers both accept
problem
Customer acquisition increasingly depends on first-party data, exactly as privacy regulation tightened around how that data may be collected and used — making the compliant path and the useful path easy to put in tension.
approach
Developed first-party data collection built to satisfy privacy and regulatory requirements from the start, so acquisition work and compliance obligations were solved together rather than negotiated after the fact.
impact
Acquisition teams get the signal they need on a foundation that holds up to regulatory scrutiny.
First-party dataPrivacyCompliance
Toolkit
What I work in
Shipped in production or in the apps on this site — not a wish list.
Languages
TypeScript · Python · Go · Swift · Kotlin · Java · SQL · BrightScript
