AboutAbout

I'm Dak, a software engineer with 15+ years of professional experience. I specialize in leading architecture and building the technical foundations—shared systems, platforms, and developer workflows—that let engineering teams move quickly without sacrificing reliability.

My perspective spans product, frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, developer experience, security, and AI. That breadth helps me see how a decision in one layer affects the rest of the system, weigh tradeoffs in context, and set direction that works for both the product and the people building it.

I've led teams of 8–12 engineers and helped scale features across a marketplace serving 16 million users. I've also built the technical foundation for an early-stage company that raised a $2.1 million pre-seed round, supported AAA game launches, and shipped early-stage products from scratch.

I treat architecture as a force multiplier. A strong foundation gives engineers clear boundaries, dependable primitives, and a paved path for common work. It makes the right thing easier to build and gives a team room to move quickly as the product grows.

I start by making the whole system legible: the product goals, technical constraints, team workflows, operational risks, and likely points of change. At Weedmaps, that approach helped move releases from months to weekly. At NCSoft, it guided a core platform rebuild from PHP to TypeScript while supporting live game launches.

My father introduced me to programming when I was five. I built my first website at ten and began working professionally in 2010. The tools have changed, but the impulse has stayed the same: understand how something works, then make something useful with it.

Some of my most formative products came from Aion Online. I founded and managed the Zephyr guild, which grew to 300 members at its peak, then built Zephyr.team into a scheduling and player platform for the community. I later rebuilt MyAion.xyz, which reached 24,000 monthly active users at its peak. Those communities taught me that the best products usually begin with a problem you understand firsthand.

I grew up around the film industry and originally considered becoming a film editor. That background still shapes how I think about pacing, storytelling, and the experience of using a product—not just whether it works.

I'm married to Nicole, still enjoy MMORPGs and strategy games, and co-host the tech night! meetup. I moved to the Bay Area in February 2026 and am based here now.

I'm focused on platform architecture and AI-enabled systems that hold up outside a demo. That means giving developers a foundation they can build on confidently: clear orchestration, useful evaluation, human review where it matters, and the operational discipline expected of traditional software.

I'm especially interested in teams working through an ambitious product or systems problem where experienced technical judgment can turn uncertainty into momentum.