Case study
Technical leadership
A Builder-to-Director progression at CNET, digital-media platform work at AOL and Frequency Networks, and a 30-person technology organization at Jukin Media.
- Role
- Engineer → Director → CTO
- Period
- 1997–2018
- Status
- Leadership experience
The longer arc
My work today is hands-on, but it rests on a longer technical and leadership background. I spent eleven years at CNET, growing from Software Engineer to Director, led the engineering teams behind AOL Music and SHOUTcast, returned to hands-on platform work as a Principal Engineer at Frequency Networks, and later served for four years as CTO of Jukin Media.
The media thread continued after Jukin. In 2020 I co-founded Vurbl, an ad-supported podcast platform, and led the engineering behind it. That work has its own case study; this page covers what came before it.
CNET: from Builder to Director
I joined CNET as a Senior Software Engineer in 1997. For most of my eleven years there, I built publishing infrastructure: tools and workflows that helped editorial and production teams turn information into high-traffic consumer products.
One project captures the kind of work I was doing. The existing database-backed interface required dozens of sequential editing steps and waits, sometimes around a hundred, before a record was ready to publish. We replaced it with a single XML document that editors could work on using ordinary text tools, upload once, and correct through a validation loop. In practice, the team found the new workflow roughly an order of magnitude faster, though we never ran a formal benchmark.
I later moved into site and platform leadership for properties including Shopper.com, Reviews.cnet.com, News.com, and Download.com. Growing into leadership from inside the systems gave me a practical view of the tradeoffs. I already knew the implementation details, publishing constraints, and operational consequences before I became responsible for teams and platform direction.
AOL Music and SHOUTcast
In 2009, I joined AOL as a Senior Technical Manager leading the software-engineering teams for AOL Music and SHOUTcast.com. It lasted nine months, but it put me in charge of technical strategy and implementation for two high-traffic digital-audio properties during a period of major change at AOL.
Frequency Networks: media infrastructure as a Principal Engineer
From 2011 to 2014, I was a Principal Software Engineer at Frequency Networks, a video platform for creating channels and distributing content across devices. I led DevOps implementation and API development for the channel-creation platform and built backend systems supporting global content distribution. The role put me back close to the code while still carrying architectural and operational responsibility across the platform.
Jukin Media: building the technology organization
I joined Jukin Media to turn an existing set of product and workflow documents into a proper media content-management system. The initial question was whether to buy or build. Over four years, I led the implementation and built the 30-person organization across engineering, product, QA, and operations that could run and continue developing it. The resulting platform supported Jukin’s global user-generated-content library and helped make the company operationally ready for an acquisition.
I left in 2018. When Trusted Media Brands acquired Jukin three years later, the content platform and technology organization we had built were still in place. That continuity is the clearest evidence that the work had become durable operating infrastructure rather than a system dependent on its original builder.
How that experience shapes my work now
Those roles taught me that architecture is more than a set of technical choices. It affects hiring, team boundaries, release speed, operating risk, and what a company can promise its customers.
That perspective makes me a stronger hands-on builder. I can make a local implementation decision while seeing its company-level consequences, explain the tradeoffs clearly, and help a small team add enough structure for its next stage without slowing it down.