Engineering leader. Twenty-five years scaling output and reducing friction.
San Francisco, CA · [email protected]
I lead engineering teams by removing friction, be it operational, engineering, or... people-related 🤯. I've taken a four-week SDLC down to a single day, resurrected a bankrupt IoT company from a cold start, and quietly shipped things colleagues said couldn't be shipped.
I love it when people tell me:
Most likely to have new company policy written about my behavior. Ask me about one company's "Taco Bell" policy.
Building a native mobile camera workflow product around clean-room Fuji camera protocol work, simulator-driven testing, and agent-friendly development loops.
The backend is a self-hosted service stack: Ruby API and worker, Rails/Avo admin, Node Apple IAP receipt service, PostgreSQL, NATS JetStream, MediaMTX live-view relay, and Prometheus/Grafana/Loki observability.
Deployment runs through a local management plane on my own infrastructure. GitHub is used for off-site Git storage and webhook triggers; environment creation, promotion, ingress, auth, secrets, internal TLS, and monitoring stay self-hosted.
Development environments are branch-scoped Compose stacks generated from GitOps manifests: fast worktrees, direnv-provided iOS build settings, pre-seeded data roots, and internal routes for each agent's API, admin, Apple-service, and stream endpoints.
Two personal endeavours: Technical recovery of a bankrupt IoT business — global ops restored and modernized from a cold start. Then, embedded vehicle work on armored Mercedes-Benz G-Class platforms. (Human overrides for self-driving vehicle systems)
Took platform engineering's SDLC from four weeks to one day. Eliminated infra-related outages by realigning the org around shipping instead of process.
Realigned infra goals around reliability. Standardized incident response from scratch and led the CI/CD migration several people said couldn't be done.
Recognized for improving talent retention and engineering hiring practices. Three teams across a Kubernetes + Terraform + Rails-monolith stack.
From Engineer #5 to Engineering Manager #1 and beyond. Took the platform from monolith to monolith+services, laucnhed first two AI services into production, scaled product 100x
96% SDLC reduction. Two major outages a month to zero. Latency from 17ms to under four. Engineers that yelled at each other in meetings to... cordial.
Direct-report orgs up to 30. Manager of managers. Mentorship that lands and sticks. Even the staff at event venues tell me I have given the best talk they've ever seen. (look, this is a resume, I can brag)
Rails 4 to 7 migration. Corrupted 100M-row databases. Firmware toolchains rebuilt from scratch. RE closed systems. CI/CD migration at Coinbase I was told "couldn't be done." Etc.
CAN-bus reverse engineering. Drive-by-wire. Machine Learning ("AI") projects (OpenCV, Scikit-learn, Bayesian inference, oh my!) since 2007.
"When others have said something can't be done, I have seen Eric quietly engineer a solution and accomplish the impossible in record time."
"Eric is a natural mentor and coach. He has a gift for identifying people's strengths and helping them reach their full potential."
"At one point we both said we'd thought about seeing if we could work remotely on Eric P's team as a path toward a happier existence."
If you're untangling something hard — infrastructure, technical challenges, team challenges, etc. — I'd like to hear about it. Or, invite me to come talk at your company meeting. You'll laugh. You'll cry.