For teams hiring an AI Engineering Leader
I lead data and AI work from inside the codebase.
I founded Vets Who Code in 2014 and have led its engineering since. I set the standards for how we build with models, I wrote most of last year’s commits, and the people I trained are working engineers.
What you get
- 300+veterans trained into software careers
- 97%job placement rate
- 12 yearsleading one engineering organization
- 310 of 361commits to the main app in the last 12 months
Outcome figures: internal cohort data, reported by Diginomica, December 2025.
The three artifacts to read
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Hashflag Skills
What I ask of AI work: a target set before measuring, an eval that reports the round where it got worse, and limits stated in public.
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Open-source program
How the organization runs in public, and why its most starred repository was written by a contributor.
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Decision records
Twelve tradeoffs, each with what it cost.
How I lead
- Publish the bar. The Standard states what every engineer in the program is trained to, in public.
- Measure the model, then ship. A non-deterministic step gets an eval and a written target before anyone builds advice on top of it.
- Make the right thing automatic. Commit format, type checks, tests and security scans are enforced by tooling, so review time goes to design.
- Give the credit away. Contributors own what they build, under their own names.
- Write the decision down. A tradeoff that is not recorded gets made again.
They didn’t just fix critical technical debt—they gave our leadership concrete systems and set our internal developers up for long-term self-sufficiency.
Skills
Logistics
I am based in Atlanta, Georgia, and work remotely. I am open to roles leading data and AI engineering teams, where the leader is expected to stay technical.