23 years in enterprise IT, 19 of them engineering identity and authentication at Progressive Insurance. Now a Senior Client Engineering Manager at IBM, leading a federal Client Engineering team. I build the systems that decide who gets in, and I have spent most of my career on the one that has to never go down.
I work on identity: the directories, authentication systems, and access controls that everything else in an organization depends on. For five years I was the enterprise authority for that at Progressive, responsible for a directory holding more than 100,000 identities and for Active Directory across 30,000 users and more than 10,000 Windows servers.
At IBM I moved into solution architecture on federal work, where the interesting problem is designing against a hard compliance standard and then proving it in front of the people who audit it. I am now a Senior Client Engineering Manager leading a team of 17 people in IBM's US Federal Market, serving more than 30 federal customers. That means I am accountable both for the people and for the technical correctness of what we put in front of a client.
I founded The Camera Group to bring the same capability to organizations that do not have an enterprise budget.
| Dates | Organization | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 to present | IBM | Senior Client Engineering Manager, US Federal Market. 17 direct reports, 30+ federal customers. |
| 2022 to 2024 | IBM | Solution Architect, Client Engineering. Federal Zero Trust, secrets management, passwordless authentication, AI solution design. |
| 2017 to 2022 | Progressive Insurance | Windows Server and Enterprise Directory SME. Led the enterprise directory migration. Co-founded the Enterprise Authentication Council. |
| 2016 to 2017 | Progressive Insurance | Cloud Engineering, Microsoft Azure Tech Specialist. Lead engineer on the company's first Azure and AWS workload migrations. |
| 2009 to 2016 | Progressive Insurance | Engineering and Server Systems Management SME. Policy rollout from one state to 40+ states. |
| 2003 to 2009 | Progressive Insurance | IT Systems Engineer Sr, Tier II and Tier III server support. |
| 1995 to 2001 | US Army National Guard | Six years of service. |
Owned the enterprise directory at scale and led its migration off an aging LDAP platform to a modern one, covering more than 100,000 identities. Because the directory is the backbone of authentication, I sequenced the move around the risk of disruption: dependency mapping, staged testing, rollback paths, and coordination with every dependent team. The estate has run at 99%+ uptime.
Authentication work was scattered across teams and inconsistent. I co-founded a standing council that brought those teams together and set shared enterprise standards for how people and services prove who they are, including least privilege and service-to-service authentication.
Partnered with Palo Alto Networks to design a combined solution for end-to-end Zero Trust based on DISA requirements, incorporating secrets management and passwordless authentication using FIDO2 and WebAuthn. Built and demonstrated the solution against 13 government scenarios, and presented it to a government technology committee in front of more than 300 employees and leaders as the master of ceremonies.
Integrated on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD to give cloud workloads a real identity foundation, then served as lead engineer on the company's first workload migrations to both Azure and AWS. Ran proofs of concept on Azure Stack and built the infrastructure-as-code process on ARM templates.
Led a policy and configuration change from a single state to a footprint of more than 40 states, coordinating regional teams and using automation to keep it consistent. Also built a graceful shutdown solution that pulled servers out of the load balancer and returned them during automated patching.
Contributed to the design of an AI solution proposal for the Army's Joint Fire program on watsonx.AI. Delivered customer-facing work on AI governance, computer vision for manufacturing inspection, AIOps, and retrieval over technical documents and lease agreements.
I currently manage 17 engineers on a federal Client Engineering team. People management is the job, but accountability for technical correctness comes with it, and that is the part that keeps it interesting.
Mentoring has run through everything I have done. I have mentored early-career engineers into architecture roles and promotions, coached engineers into owning client-facing engagements they were not running before, and supervised new hires. I also ran it in both directions, working with a mentor of my own with more than 20 years of experience.
Outside my own team I have led internal communities of practice so the skills spread rather than sitting with one person, and spent most of my career in daily peer forums where engineers work through their hardest problems together.
The areas I have actually delivered in, deepest first.