I joined AssetMark in July 2026 as Staff Engineering Director to lead Developer Experience and Cloud Platform Engineering. The mandate is not “more tools.” It is foundational platform work — the kind that makes every other team faster without asking them to become platform engineers.
Wealth management software is not a playground. The people shipping it need paths they can trust: build, review, deploy, observe, roll back. If those paths are slow, tribal, or slightly different in every repo, experts spend their attention on archaeology instead of judgment.
What DevEx actually is
Developer Experience is the product you ship to your own engineers. Pipelines, templates, environments, paved roads, documentation that does not rot. The interface of the organization, rendered as YAML and runbooks.
I treat it the way I treat any production system. Contracts. Observability. Failure modes you can explain at 3 a.m. Adoption that is earned because the official path is faster than the shadow one.
The work
The program sits on a few bets:
- Golden paths over golden rules. Standards nobody follows are decorations. A path that is faster than a workaround is the only standard that survives.
- Self-service before tickets. Ephemeral environments, Terraform modules, and deployment frameworks that do not require a human in the loop for the common case.
- CI/CD as a product. GitHub workflows that are observable, cache-aware, and honest about what they prove — not a 40-minute tax on every pull request.
- Cloud as a foundation, not a catalog. Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Azure, AWS, GCP — chosen for the job, wrapped so teams do not have to become cloud anthropologists to ship.
- AI on a path that already works. Assistants accelerate delivery only after the platform is trustworthy. Otherwise you automate confusion.
The Expert Vision lens
My research into how experts perceive complex environments is not a side hobby here. Experts do not read a platform linearly. They look for structure first — the paved road, the contract, the rollback story — then they dive into detail. If that structure is missing, they invent it locally. That is how you get twelve ways to deploy the same kind of service.
DevEx is how you put the expert scan path into the platform itself.
Partnership, not a ticket queue
Platform work dies when it becomes a service desk with better branding. The job is to sit with engineering, architecture, product, security, and operations and translate business needs into capabilities teams can operate without us in the room.
If we are still the bottleneck six months later, we built a dependency, not a platform.