Land id
Interactive property mapping for real estate, land, and conservation.
Principal Engineer
2026 – Present- Working on auth, APIs, and infrastructure.
About
A decade of making
hard guarantees hold.
I'm a principal software engineer based in New York, working on auth, APIs, and infrastructure at Land id. Most of my career has been spent on infrastructure that other engineers build on top of — storage layers, calculation engines, resource models, encryption boundaries, knowledge graphs. The through-line is correctness under pressure: systems where being wrong quietly is far worse than being slow loudly.
I started at Workiva in 2014 on the product side, working on the Data Collection extension, and became the team's go-to engineer for customer escalations and root cause analysis. That reputation for digging into other people's systems is what pulled me onto platform teams, where I led the distributed graph traversal and calculation engine behind every spreadsheet formula and document edit in the product. Later, as a staff engineer on Data Platform, I architected Bring Your Own Key — customer-managed encryption for a platform handling SEC filings and SOX compliance — and sat across the table from security teams at Fortune 100 companies and large institutional banks.
I joined HashiCorp in 2022 as the third engineer on Consul API Gateway, moved into the lead role, and grew that team to seven while contributing to the Kubernetes Gateway API specification and its conformance tests. From there I led the broader Consul product through its v2 resource model — a ground-up schema redesign that migrated the core API from eventual to strong consistency — and then led Project Infragraph from nothing to an internal alpha ahead of schedule, including guiding the engineering team through HashiCorp's acquisition by IBM.
My last stretch at HashiCorp was leading discovery and prototyping for an enterprise AI platform: how customers deploy and manage agentic workloads securely, whether as a multi-tenant managed service or single-tenant on-premise. The interesting problems were the isolation model — single-use pods per invocation, per-tenant namespaces — and credential handling through Vault and EKS Pod Identity.
Running Music League solo for nine years taught me the other half of the job. Hundreds of thousands of users across six continents, one engineer, 24/7 on-call, and every decision about infrastructure cost, hiring, support, and partnerships landing on my desk. I sold my ownership stake in 2025 and co-founded Mixtape Hero to build the idea again with everything I learned the first time.
Currently
Platforms
Systems
Practice
Based in
“I particularly enjoyed working closely with Nathan. He is super collaborative, kind, and gives good feedback.”
Experience
The long version.
HashiCorp
Infrastructure automation, service networking, and secrets management.
Staff Engineer, Enterprise AI Platform
2026- Led discovery and prototyping for a platform to let customers securely deploy and manage agentic workloads as a multi-tenant managed service or a single-tenant on-premise deployment.
- Prototyped the agent execution model around Kubernetes-native isolation — single-use pods per invocation, per-tenant namespaces — with credential handling via Vault and EKS Pod Identity.
- Built on Project Infragraph so agents could react to infrastructure events and code changes across hybrid cloud environments.
Lead Engineer, Project Infragraph
2024 – 2025- Real-time infrastructure knowledge graph unifying resources, applications, ownership, and policy across hybrid cloud into a single queryable source of truth — the normalized context layer for AI agents and automation operating against customer infrastructure.
- Architected support for first-party and third-party data connectors hosted in cloud and on-premise; used AWS IAM primitives and storage isolation to host multi-tenant graph data with separated control plane and data plane.
- Defined event-driven APIs enabling downstream agents and automation to react to infrastructure changes, focused on consistency guarantees and query performance at enterprise scale.
- Led the team to internal alpha ahead of schedule with additional features, working directly with Product and early customers to shape the feature set.
- Led the engineering team through the acquisition by IBM and the internal integrations that followed.
Lead Engineer, Consul
2023 – 2024- Partnered with the Central Architecture Group on Consul's v2 resource model — a ground-up schema redesign that migrated the core API from eventual to strong consistency.
- Refined the working model and grew the team by six engineers; introduced a design/UX partnership and contributed heavily to product direction.
- Transitioned ownership of the product to a new team.
Lead Engineer, Consul API Gateway
2022 – 2023- Third engineer to join the team and later its lead; partnered with my manager on hiring goals and the interview process, growing the team to seven engineers. Announcement.
- Contributed to the Kubernetes Gateway SIG API specification and conformance tests; implemented the Kubernetes controller and CRDs against that specification.
- Led knowledge-sharing sessions and authored long-term documentation for the support engineering organization, equipping first-line on-call with a working model of the product's internals and failure modes.
Mixtape Hero
Music discovery through friends, not feeds.
Co-founder
2025 – Present- Building the next take on social music sharing: themed rounds, blind voting, and a reveal — playing entirely through players' existing Spotify and Apple Music subscriptions.
- No ads, no data sales, no hosted music. Free to play, with optional boosts for larger groups and extra rounds.
Music League
Cloud-native consumer social app for sharing music with friends.
Founder
2016 – 2025- Sole engineer and operator from zero to hundreds of thousands of users across six continents; owned hiring, programming, infrastructure, support, cost management, and 24/7 on-call for nine years.
- Onboarded and managed two business partners, plus contractors.
- Featured in The Verge and on Double J (Australia), and mentioned in a 2026 New York Times profile.
- Sold my ownership stake in 2025.
Workiva
Cloud-native financial and regulated reporting — SEC filings, SOX compliance, FedRAMP.
Staff Engineer, Data Platform
2019 – 2022- Lead engineer and architect for Bring Your Own Key, the enterprise data encryption solution; designed and built a custom Kubernetes controller and CRDs, extending prior blob storage work to integrate alongside MySQL.
- Executed proofs of concept with multiple key management vendors to evaluate integration, security, and operational tradeoffs before committing to a production architecture.
- Worked directly with security teams from Fortune 100 companies and large institutional banks.
- Architected the platform-wide migration away from Adobe Flash and Python 2.
Lead Engineer, Platform Teams
2017 – 2019- Lead engineer for the distributed graph traversal and calculation engine powering spreadsheet formulas and document edits; eliminated recurring out-of-memory failures and reduced operational costs by 20% on Google App Engine through payload compression, in-flight job deduplication, and tuning of the traversal algorithm.
- Drew on prior Data Collection experience to close longstanding gaps in the calculation engine that had been generating repeat support escalations.
- Built the distributed consistency solution for Linking, ensuring strong consistency for SEC filings.
- Built the encrypted blob storage solution, with a focus on security and performance.
Software Engineer, Product Development
2014 – 2017- Core contributor to the Data Collection extension; became the team's go-to engineer for customer support escalations and root cause analysis, on a reputation for deep system knowledge and debugging rigor.
Education
Auburn University.
Senior design focused on Monte Carlo simulations of chemical systems on GPU hardware — reducing algorithmic complexity from O(n²) to O(n) and parallelizing with CUDA, which brought runtimes down from months to hours.
National Merit Scholar.
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