An engineer who ended up running the software

I trained as a civil engineer: geology at Bates, then a master’s in civil engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. My first working years were as a groundwater engineer at Leonard Rice Engineers, designing water wells. Then I fell into software and never really came back, though the engineering habit came with me.

Civil engineering doesn’t assume things will work. A well is going to fail eventually: the pump breaks, the water table drops, something gets into the aquifer. You plan for that before it happens, not after. I think about software the same way. An agent that can send email, move money, or write to a production database will eventually do something nobody intended. So will a script with too much access, or a website with no rollback plan. Getting the happy path to work is rarely the interesting part of the job. The interesting part is the guardrails for the day it doesn’t: approval gates, access boundaries, a rollback path, monitoring that notices before a customer does.

I co-founded Aclymate and I’ve been its CTO ever since. We help companies measure and cut their carbon footprint, and we’ve stayed a small team on purpose. That meant facing a decision early that most companies get to put off: either the operational work grows headcount, or somebody builds the automation instead. We picked the second, and spent years building whatever that took at the time. The AI-native version of it only started a few months ago, and it’s taught me more about where automation actually breaks down than everything before it combined.

The part that caught me off guard was how much more the teaching mattered than the building. Handing a colleague a finished tool is useful. Teaching them to spec it, build it, break it, and fix it themselves is worth a lot more. It’s also the part almost nobody selling AI services wants to do, because it makes them optional. That’s the work I actually want more of.

That’s my dog up there, keeping the color scheme humble. Outside of work I’m an Eagle Scout, I’m bilingual in French and close to fluent in Spanish, and I spend most weekends outside with him, hiking or skiing depending on the season.