Forty years leading high-performance teams to pioneer transformative technologies, including Alexa's speech and knowledge systems.
View on LinkedInI've spent 40 years leading teams that turn ambitious ideas into real-world technology. From real-time systems and speech recognition to large-scale AI, my focus has always been on solving tough technical challenges while empowering the people who tackle them. I've worked across startups and global enterprises like Nokia, Microsoft, and Amazon, growing teams from a handful of engineers to 600+ across multiple locations. Great leadership isn't about hierarchy or control but about trust, collaboration, and setting teams up for success. Now, I'm focused on sharing what I've learned to help companies build, scale, and take on the next big challenge.
I started my career as a hands-on coder, specializing in real-time systems and digital signal processing. I later developed speech recognition and NLP solutions at VoiceSignal (acquired by Nuance) and Unveil Technologies (acquired by Microsoft). In 2012, Al Lindsay hired me to lead speech recognition and NLP for Alexa. My team grew from 30 to over 500, building the world's first far-field speech recognition system and powering Alexa's voice capabilities across Fire Phone, Fire TV, and Amazon's mobile app. From 2016 to 2022, I led the development of Alexa's knowledge graph, scaling services that processed billions of interactions from 100M+ users weekly. After a decade at Amazon, I joined Rokt as Chief Product & Engineering Officer, helping the company scale its machine learning capabilities and nearly double in size and valuation.
Success isn't just about hiring top talent — it's about building teams that solve complex challenges and create lasting impact. My focus has shifted from the technology itself to developing the kind of high-performance teams that can tackle ambitious goals. A great team isn't just a collection of experts. It thrives on trust, accountability, and the right balance of autonomy and structure. At Techquity, I help organizations build and scale these teams by sharing the lessons I've learned from leading global organizations and driving innovation.
