For my watsonx Platform Engineering role, I lead the software engineering efforts in IBM Research to accelerate IBM and open source innovations into IBM and partners products. In my Open Innovation job I drive the broad strategy and execution for IBM’s participation in open ecosystems including but not limited to open source.

I lead the engineering organization in IBM Research who drive the evolution of watsonx platform technology, with the goal of making it possible for the world’s enterprises to use the most powerful AI for mission- and safety-critical workloads in any cloud, on premises, and on the edge.The scope of this work includes foundation model training, inference, and tuning, as well as embeddable AI. We work closely with our colleagues in IBM OpenTech and Red Hat to evolve an open source core, with a special focus on PyTorch, Hugging Face, and Ray. Our work is picked up both by the IBM watsonx.ai product and commercial partners.

IBM is transforming our approach to innovation towards Open Innovation, which is an approach to innovation that prioritizes openness and knowledge sharing. In this role, I’m responsible for the strategy and execution of our Open Innovation strategy, bridging between the IBM senior leadership team and the 120,000 person IBM technical community.

I lead an integrated research and development team who evolve the foundational IBM AI technologies powering IBM and ISV products and services and select advanced customer engagements.

In 2021, I chaired the IBM Data and AI Technology Team. This team consists of our IBM Fellows, Distinguished Designers, and Distinguished Engineers, who are collectively responsible for defining and advancing technical strategy, and for ensuring that we have a vital, diverse, and inclusive technical culture.

In this role, I led the evolution of Watson’s developer APIs and SDKs for core AI services including natural language understanding, speech services, and visual recognition. I also led the evolution of the common foundational cloud and machine learning substratum underlying these services. Finally, I led the program to infuse AI into IBM’s software portfolio.

As IBM embraced our hybrid multicloud strategy, I lead a team of designers and developers to create new “try” experiences, including both the IBM Demos property (ibm.com/demos), as well as the Cloud Pak Experiences property (ibm.com/cloud/paks/experiences).

From 2015 through 2017, I ran an initiative to overhaul IBM’s development tools. Initially the idea was just “a world-class toolchain” but along the way we realized it was much more important than that, as I described in my “Tools as a Catalyst for Culture Change” article.

In 2014 and 2015 I worked on the IBM Design core team with a mission of harmonizing design thinking (new to me) with Agile and DevOps (for which I had deep understanding). Along the way, I helped deliver the web app part of the IBM Design Language (ibm.com/design/language) and realized that a great toolchain could help bring the disciplines together (see subsequent job).

I led a small team to design and implement IBM Service Engage, which eventually grew into the IBM Marketplace. The most important outcome of this project is that we gave the company confidence that we could embrace DevOps culture, as described in my “Working Like a Startup at IBM” article.The Service Engage toolchain eventually informed the adoption of Slack and GitHub Enterprise a few years later.

During this time period I was responsible for early versions of IBM Private Cloud technology which culminated in our adoption of OpenStack.

Worked to establish an IBM point of view on DevOps in the enterprise, learning from industry leaders like Etsy.

I worked as a software product developer for IBM Rational software, where I managed the Jazz Foundation Web UI Frameworks team and architected the web frameworks underlying products like Rational Team Concert v1.0 to 3.0.

During my time in IBM Rational, one of the most fun and rewarding projects was starting the Jazz.net web site.My leadership team at the time, Dave Thomson, John Wiegand, and Erich Gamma, had previously lead the Eclipse project, and had the idea that even though our Rational Jazz products were not free, we could still work with the transparency of an open source project. They asked me to partner with Dejan Glozic to create the Jazz.net web site (https://jazz.net/), which became the digital face of this “open commercial development,” which we launched publicly in January 2008.One of my fondest memories of this project was when my VP Jamie Thomas and I were sharing the web site with James Governor of Redmonk, and when James suggested an improvement, I opened a bug on the spot against our real product bug repository and subscribed him for updates. While this is pretty normal today, at the time it was quite novel, and a first for a commercial IBM software product.

My second job at IBM was still in IBM Global Services but I moved out of internal application development and into a group called Systems Engineering and Architecture. This group was lead by folks who had worked at IBM in the Federal Systems Division, so was heavy on process and compliance. While in this group I worked on a number of projects. A few of the highlights were a huge internal supply chain project to “Beat Dell” (we didn’t) and the technical separation of our PC Division when we sold it to Lenovo.

After graduating with a B.S. in computer science from Penn State, I joined an IBM Global Services team as a software developer working on two related internal ecommerce web applications: PartnerCommerce and PartnerCommerce Servers. These applications enabled our business partners to purchase PCs and servers from us, respectively.On this job I learned many of the fundamentals of software engineering: programming in a team context, source control, build systems, planning, etc.

In 2020, 20 years after I graduated from Penn State, I re-engaged as the executive technical advisor from IBM. In this role, I advise Penn State on a number of fronts including technology, research, the engineering profession, and recruiting.

From 2020 to 2022 I advised Hexos IP, a startup attempting to dramatically simplify the complex world of international intellectual property (IP) management.