I am an engineering leader with over two decades of experience across academia and industry, focused on building high-performance, reliable systems and the teams behind them. My work spans blockchain, security, and distributed systems.

Most recently, I served as Head of Engineering at Aptos Labs, where I led engineering execution during rapid growth. I was part of the founding team at Aptos, following earlier work on the Libra/Diem blockchain at Meta.

My path to Aptos began in 2019, when I joined Meta’s Libra/Diem initiative. There, I translated rapidly changing requirements into shippable systems, including core inter-node protocols, validator security, on-chain governance, and production network bootstrapping. After Diem wound down, I partnered with teams at Instagram and Facebook to build Meta’s first Web3 engineering team, connecting Facebook to public blockchains including Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon.

In early 2022, I re-joined many of my former colleagues to launch Aptos. My work there focused on problems that only surface at scale and under real-world constraints: launching a production Layer 1, making performance and cost predictable under load, delivering best-in-class Web3 developer and consumer experiences, and building teams capable of sustained execution. My scope spanned protocol, product, and organizational design.

Highlights from this period included shipping mainnet, advancing the Move language and digital asset standards, reducing transaction costs to industry-leading levels, enabling sub-second peer-to-peer transfers, scaling TVL past $1B, and helping establish the ecosystem foundations that enabled independent teams, developers, and partners to build long-term. By mid-2025, Aptos had strong technology, partnerships, and organizational depth, giving me the confidence to step back for the first time in years to reflect, recharge, and prepare for new challenges.

Before Aptos, my career was rooted in academia. I earned my B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, working with Professor Renato Figueiredo on network virtualization and distributed systems. My doctoral work led to the development of IPOP, a peer-to-peer virtual private network, and Grid Appliance, one of the first decentralized cross-cloud computing platforms.

I later joined Yale University as a Research Scientist in Professor Bryan Ford’s group, where I focused on privacy and anonymity. There, I co-led Dissent, a scalable anonymous group communication system (OSDI’12, USENIX SEC’13, CCS’13).

In 2015, I moved from academia to Facebook, where I shifted from research to impact at scale. I led teams in the Ads Growth organization, driving initiatives that improved advertiser adoption by over 10%, adding nearly a million sustained active advertisers.

Outside of work, I enjoy running, explore stocks, and more often than I'd like to admit play video games. I have done the Insanity Workout several times, I cannot recommend it enough as both a great way to get in shape but also amazing positive reinforcement. When I'm not running or flinging my body around, I enjoy sweets with my wife, Xiaofei, and watching Anime with my sons Isaac and Solomon. At one point, I was ranked in the top 20 on the US East Warcraft III Free For All Ladder.