The Team · August 2026
The team rebuilding the government's front door.
Enter your email to view the directory. It covers everyone at Kaizen across engineering, data, design, deployment, growth, and operations.
Confidential · Not for distribution
In conversation
Who we are working to bring on.
Confidential
Board and investor use. These are active recruiting conversations, not commitments, and several individuals are currently employed elsewhere. Not for distribution to agencies or inclusion in any proposal.
Chase Ausley
linkedin.com/in/chase-ausley-ba696310
Principal Deputy Director and Chief Product Operating Officer, Office of Health Technology and Products, CMS
Principal Deputy Director of CMS's new Office of Health Technology and Products and its Chief Product Operating Officer, arriving from a Director role at the U.S. DOGE Service. Working relationships across HHS, CMS, Treasury, the Department of War, and the VA, and has led efforts to unwind entrenched legacy contracts and re-compete them, giving him mechanical knowledge of federal buying rather than adjacency to it. Private-sector background at CareBridge, Elevance Health, Optum, SAP Concur, and The Advisory Board Company. Has already surfaced pipeline for Kaizen at the Administration for Children and Families and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.
Status
Verbal acceptance on terms; signature pending. Target start end of October.
Samantha Segall
linkedin.com/in/samantha-segall
Chief Growth Officer, Shift5
Chief Growth Officer at Shift5, the onboard-data and operational-technology cybersecurity company serving defense and critical infrastructure. Joined September 2025 as SVP, Growth Officer and was formalized into the C-suite in June 2026, with a remit covering federal sales, marketing, and external affairs. Her strength is government affairs: she is a registered lobbyist with deep standing in Washington. Kaizen reshaped its Head of Government Affairs search around her into a broader Head of Federal Growth role spanning government affairs, international expansion, and top-of-funnel go-to-market. She has already advised the company on its DC strategy.
Status
Final stage. Onsite complete; references underway.
Dawn Zimmer
linkedin.com/in/dawn-zimmer-4b340a2
Chief Information Officer, U.S. Department of Energy
Sitting CIO at the Department of Energy, made permanent in November 2025 after serving as Acting CIO and Principal Deputy CIO. More than 25 years across government, academia, and the private sector in enterprise IT modernization, cybersecurity, and digital service delivery, including senior IT leadership at the FAA and the Department of Justice, and Executive Director of IT Engagement and Experience at Virginia Tech. Named a 2026 Wash100 winner. The value to Kaizen is her standing inside the federal CIO community.
Status
Early. Introduced through a16z; role scope in discussion.
Kaydee James
linkedin.com/in/kaydee-james-14747b24
Chief of Staff, Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, U.S. Department of War
Chief of Staff to the Department of War's CDAO, overseeing strategic technology initiatives including the War Data Platform and Maven Smart Systems, plus budgeting, contracting, and coordination across government and industry. Came to CDAO from Chief of Staff of the U.S. DOGE Service, and before government held leadership roles at Meta's Reality Labs and Salesforce. For Kaizen the value is access and workforce strategy: her office is where Tradewinds awardable status sits.
Status
Exploratory. Timing did not align earlier this year; conversation reopened in August.
In conversation · confidential
The team
Organized by team.
Each entry that follows covers current responsibilities at Kaizen, prior professional experience, education, military service where applicable, and core competencies.
Executive
// 001
Nikhil Reddy
Co-Founder & CEO
// 002
KJ Shah
Co-Founder & COO
// 003
John Puma
Chief of Staff
Engineering
// 004
Timothy Richardson
Chief Technology Officer · Incoming
// 005
Lou Giacalone
Head of Platform Engineering
// 006
Nicholas Cathcart
Senior Software Engineer
// 007
Matthew Kohn
Senior Software Engineer · Incoming
// 008
Steven Huynh
Infrastructure Engineer
// 009
Patrick J. Hoyt
Quality Engineer
// 010
Shaham Noorani
Software Engineer, Forward Deployed
// 011
Jamie Goodin
Software Engineer
// 012
Jaclyn Naomi Barrera
Software Engineer · Incoming
// 013
Amogh Chaubey
Software Engineer · Incoming
The team
The team · continued
Data
Design
// 016
Daman Chatha
Design Lead
// 017
Ivy Li
Senior Product Designer
// 018
Carlos Lim
Senior Product Designer
Deployment & Customer Operations
// 019
Mac Marrone
Head of Customer Operations · Veteran
// 020
Jared Carrow
Customer Success Manager
// 021
Maureen Boyer
Customer Support Manager
// 022
Margo Mitchell
Deployment Strategist
// 023
Nico Turk
Deployment Strategist
// 024
Vivian Ellis
Deployment Strategist
// 025
Kara Vohra
Deployment Strategist
// 026
Michael Salib
Deployment Strategist
The team
The team · continued
Federal Growth & Capture
// 027
Sean O'Donnell
Senior Director of Growth · Veteran
// 028
Jake Castillo
Senior Director of Growth · Veteran
// 029
David Jones
Proposal & Capture Lead
// 030
Matt Abrams
Proposal Writer & Capture Strategist
State & Local Business Development
// 031
Michael Atkinson
Head of Sales
// 032
Jeff Goldberg
Account Executive
// 033
Megan McCaffrey
Account Executive
Finance & Business Operations
// 034
Kevin Dennehy
Strategic Finance Lead
// 035
Benjamin Rubenstein
Senior Business Operations Manager
People & Talent
The team
Nikhil Reddy
EXECUTIVE
Co-Founder & CEO | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/bignikhilreddy
Engineer by training and co-founder of Kaizen, with earlier software work at Anduril Industries and Tesla. Sets technical and product direction for the company and is the approving manager on engineering hires. Owns the government business, from municipal recreation software to modernization programs at agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Co-Founder & CEO
June 2022 - Present
·
Founded and leads Kaizen, whose constituent services platform serves more than 40 million citizens across federal, state, and local government.
·
Owns the federal portfolio, from civilian modernization at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Education, and Commerce to the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace delivered for a joint interagency task force under the Department of War.
·
Sets product and technical direction, and built the engineering organization delivering it, including the leadership now running platform and delivery.
Anduril Industries — Software Engineer
Jul 2019 - Dec 2021
Defense technology manufacturer of autonomous systems and command-and-control software
·
Designed, prototyped, and implemented user interfaces used across the company's product lines.
·
Worked directly with end users to gather workflow requirements and build tailored prototypes.
·
Deployed web applications integrated with Anduril's software and hardware ecosystems, including map and geospatial visualization work later reused in defense contexts.
Tesla Motors — Software Engineer
May 2018 - Aug 2018
·
Analyzed vehicle signal and alert data and built machine learning models to improve existing diagnostic platforms.
·
Developed back-end features and APIs supporting Tesla's proprietary auto-diagnostics machine.
Recology — Technical Product Management
Aug 2017 - Dec 2017
Waste collection and recycling company
·
Built a waste scanner product, including the storage server and an image classifier distinguishing metal, plastic, trash, compost, recyclables, paper, and cardboard.
·
Prototyped a hardware/IoT camera device that ran the classifier in real time on objects entering collection bins.
Tesla Motors — Software Engineer
May 2017 - Aug 2017
·
Built software for Tesla's auto-diagnostics machine using machine learning algorithms and node-based networks to diagnose vehicle faults.
·
Created a platform letting service technicians enter a vehicle identification number and session date to generate a full diagnostics report.
·
Optimized builds for the Toolbox desktop application used by service technicians.
Education
B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
Accel Scholar, selected by Accel for achievement in technology and entrepreneurship
Core competencies
Product and engineering leadership; federal capture strategy; defense technology; back-end development (Python, Java, C); machine learning (TensorFlow, Keras); API design for high-usage applications; data analysis and visualization; user interface design and prototyping
Nikhil Reddy · Co-Founder & CEO
KJ Shah
EXECUTIVE
Co-Founder & COO | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/kjpshah
Co-founder and operating executive, previously a technology investment banking analyst at William Blair and head of finance at Flockjay. Runs business operations, accounting, and people functions at Kaizen, and carries the chief financial officer role. Owns the federal opportunity pipeline, forecasting discipline, contract pricing review, and board reporting.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Co-Founder & COO
June 2022 - Present
·
Co-founded Kaizen and runs the operating side of the company: business operations, finance, and people, carrying the chief financial officer role.
·
Owns the federal opportunity pipeline and the forecasting discipline behind it, and sets contract pricing and rate structure on federal awards.
·
Built the financial and reporting infrastructure the company runs on, from month-end close through board reporting, and scaled the operating model behind its federal expansion.
Flockjay — Chief of Staff & Finance Lead
Feb 2021 - May 2022
Sales training and enablement company
·
Partnered with the chief executive on business and financial planning, quarterly and annual objectives, equity management, grant writing, and financial audits.
·
Built and ran the operating model, setting monthly targets with functional owners and holding the organization to them.
·
Constructed a four-year financial model used for business outlook, capital planning, and budgeting.
·
Rebuilt and automated the tuition collections process, raising the collection rate by 35%.
William Blair — Investment Banking Senior Analyst, Technology Group
Jul 2018 - Feb 2021
Investment bank
·
Executed live mergers, acquisitions, and private placements across software, enterprise IT, and internet sectors: sell-side marketing materials, valuation analysis, due diligence, and buyer outreach.
·
On the sale of AVI-SPL to Marlin Equity Partners, tracked and answered roughly 1,000 diligence requests and maintained a data room of about 10,000 documents across 70 users.
·
On the sale of Insurance Technologies to Thomas H. Lee Partners, built the product-level revenue forecast model with the chief financial officer and acted as the primary liaison between the C-suite and five bidders.
·
Closed a $60M Series C investment for a direct-to-consumer nutrition platform.
Visa Inc. — Corporate Finance Analyst, Technology Group
May 2017 - Aug 2017
·
Rebuilt the procurement decision framework for the Global Technology Group, including a savings-identification decision tree and published internal guide.
·
Reallocated $10M of outsourced labor spend and presented the findings to the senior director of finance.
Education
B.S. Business Administration, Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley (Education minor; GPA 3.7/4.0)
Core competencies
Business operations; financial planning and analysis; federal pipeline management and forecasting; contract pricing and rate structures; board reporting; human resources and corporate policy; mergers and acquisitions; SIE, Series 63, Series 79; Gujarati
KJ Shah · Co-Founder & COO
John Puma
EXECUTIVE
Chief of Staff | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/johnjpuma
Operator with roughly ten years running back-office and revenue functions at venture-backed companies, including AbstractOps and a fractional chief operating officer practice covering twelve startups. Owns compliance, legal, and corporate administration at Kaizen, and the special projects the executive team needs carried.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Chief of Staff
February 2024 - Present
·
Owns compliance and legal broadly: took the company through CMMC Level 2 and directs the FedRAMP, NIST SP 800-171, and SOC 2 programs that qualify it to hold agency work.
·
Manages outside counsel and the contracting relationships behind customer agreements, subcontracts, and teaming, and holds the facility-clearance sponsorship track.
·
Runs corporate administration and the special projects the executive team hands off, from the compliance, security, and contracts hiring pipelines to federal market analysis and opening the company's Washington, DC office.
AbstractOps — Head of Operations; previously Fractional Chief of Staff
Apr 2021 - Feb 2024
AI-assisted payroll tax compliance for remote teams, with an embedded fractional operations practice; backed by Craft Ventures, 8VC, and Hustle Fund.
·
Supported the launch of an AI-assisted state compliance product from zero to 100+ customers, with 4x revenue growth in under a year, and stood up the product operations function using usage data to drive roadmap prioritization.
·
As fractional chief of staff, embedded operations leadership across 12 Series A and Series B startups, leading four financings that closed over $90M alongside founders, investors, finance, and legal counsel.
·
Onboarded 400+ employees and contractors and ran monthly payroll exceeding $2M, with equity administration in Carta and Pulley.
·
Handled human resources and regulatory compliance, 409A valuations, insurance, benefits, IT, accounts receivable and payable, and financial reporting for client companies.
Places For Less — Director of Operations
May 2019 - Apr 2021
Virtual-reality-based real estate marketplace and on-demand agent model
·
Ran company operations for a team of 60, fulfilling 400+ real estate showings per month using Homebase, DocuSign, and third-party route optimization software.
·
Led sales operations and a Salesforce implementation that cut manual effort 40% while processing 1,000+ leads per month.
Wizio — Co-Founder & COO
May 2017 - May 2019
Virtual reality apartment tour content provider; acquired by Places For Less
·
Built the largest virtual reality real estate content library in the market at 20,000+ listings, which brought in funding and industry partnerships.
·
Negotiated and closed the acquisition of Wizio by Places For Less and managed the transition.
Education
B.S. Business Administration (Entrepreneurship, Management, and Health Sciences), Northeastern University, 2017
Two co-ops at Ernst & Young, Strategic Growth Markets team, New York
Core competencies
Federal compliance program management (CMMC Level 2, NIST SP 800-171, FedRAMP 20x, SOC 2, HIPAA); subcontract flowdown and obligation tracking; federal acquisition and market analysis; business operations; human resources and people operations; equity and payroll administration; vendor and adviser management
John Puma · Chief of Staff
Timothy Richardson
ENGINEERING
Incoming · Sept 2026Chief Technology Officer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/timothycrichardson
Technology executive with 30 years leading data and analytics, software engineering, and AI/ML organizations in highly regulated industries with a global footprint. Specializes in translating organizational strategy into scalable, secure technology.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Chief Technology Officer
September 2026
·
Will command Kaizen's platform and delivery engineering organizations as the single point of accountability for both.
·
Will own the platform architecture, sequencing reusable core modules so they serve concurrent federal engagements rather than fracturing under delivery pressure.
·
Will set federal technical strategy, including FedRAMP posture, DoD IL4/IL5 readiness, and procurement-aware architecture.
Aurora Flight Sciences (a Boeing Company) — Chief Data Officer
Jan 2024 - Present
Designer and manufacturer of advanced autonomous aircraft.
·
Reports to the CEO with executive responsibility for enterprise IT operations, data management and governance, applied AI development, and SAP ERP across a hybrid on-premises and multi-cloud (AWS, Azure) environment; leads 40 staff and contractors across five US and Swiss facilities on a $20M annual budget.
·
Achieved CMMC Level 2 accreditation with a perfect score (110/110) across the hybrid environment, validated by independent third-party audit, demonstrating the cybersecurity maturity required to safeguard sensitive US Government data.
·
Implemented an enterprise data catalog with classification and masking of PII, ITAR, and US Government data, end-to-end data lineage, and automated data quality, establishing the governance foundation required for a regulated environment.
FanDuel — Senior Vice President of Data
Apr 2021 - Dec 2023
·
Reported to the CTO with executive responsibility for enterprise data management, analytics, real-time data, governance, and AI/ML operations in a 100% AWS environment; led a global team across seven offices on a ~$15M annual budget, expanding the data organization 2.5x from 35 to 90 while reducing turnover 20%.
·
Established a responsible AI governance framework covering explainability, bias monitoring, drift detection, model retraining, and regulatory compliance for production machine learning models used in fraud detection.
Govini — Chief Technology Officer
Jul 2015 - Apr 2021
Data and software company delivering integrated commercial and government data to streamline federal acquisition.
·
Prepared the Decision Science Platform for FedRAMP accreditation, implementing more than 300 security controls defined in NIST SP 800-53 and conducting a third-party preparatory audit; the platform was accredited as Govini Ark in 2025.
·
Delivered a top-to-bottom redesign of the platform UI, data visualization, API, and data layer to support advanced analytics and graph-based intelligence features, contributing to $25M in post-release revenue growth.
The Boeing Company — Chief Technologist, Integrated Information Systems
May 2012 - Jun 2015
Business unit providing large-scale data engineering and SaaS intelligence to the US Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.
·
Developed a suite of advanced statistical indicators credited with $500M-$1B in annual loss-prevention savings across Boeing's global security operations.
·
Consolidated fragmented national defense data analysis and engineering programs into a cohesive $180M annual line of business.
Kestrel (a Boeing Company) — Vice President of Engineering Operations
Mar 2010 - Apr 2012
Data management and systems integration services to the Intelligence Community.
·
Expanded Kestrel's core data architecture into the Defense Intelligence Agency's full-service Orion Data Layer, which became DIA's system of record for global mission data, generating $35M in annual revenue and influencing community-wide data standards.
Education
Bachelor of Arts in Economics, Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA
Core competencies
Enterprise data platform architecture; AI/ML and MLOps in production; FedRAMP, CMMC, and NIST SP 800-53; ITAR and controlled-data governance; multi-cloud (AWS, Azure); Databricks; SAP ERP; organizational design and scaling
Timothy Richardson · Chief Technology Officer
Lou Giacalone
ENGINEERING
Head of Platform Engineering | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/lgiacalone3
Engineering leader with 10+ years building and running product engineering organizations. Leads the platform team that builds Kaizen's reusable, security-hardened foundation for federal delivery, working hands-on in architecture and compliance engineering.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Head of Platform Engineering
July 2025 - Present
·
Leads the platform engineering organization: the reusable module library, security and compliance engineering, and the internal tooling every federal deployment inherits.
·
Co-owns the FedRAMP authorization track and the multi-tenant data isolation architecture underpinning every government deployment.
·
Set the software supply-chain and static-analysis standard the codebase is held to, and authored the authorization boundary documentation behind Kaizen's federal work.
Roots — VP of Software Engineering
Oct 2024 - Jul 2025
·
Restructured the engineering team from a frontend/backend split into product-focused pods, improving ownership and cross-functional collaboration, and introduced a quarterly roadmapping process with Product that improved delivery predictability.
·
Guided the launch of a platform combining document processing and automation capability, coordinating rollout, live triage, and bug resolution to a stable release.
·
Built an end-to-end Playwright testing framework gating merges through Azure Pipelines, reducing defects by over 50%.
Pair Eyewear — Director of Engineering, then VP of Engineering
Jan 2022 - Oct 2024
·
Designed and implemented a custom order management system spanning prescription transcription (manual and OCR), lens lab submission, and fulfillment, reducing order processing time from roughly 14 days to 7 and customer-facing processing from 7 days to 2.
·
Oversaw a headless replatform and CMS implementation, improving site speed 2x through static site generation while enabling self-service content creation.
·
Architected international expansion into three new markets, a product data restructure, and a subscription management platform; established the IT and Business Systems departments, including Okta, Meraki, and Jamf implementations.
Casper — Senior Software Engineer, then Engineering Manager and Director of Engineering
Dec 2016 - Jan 2022
·
Managed retail and customer-experience engineering teams plus IT and infrastructure; led the reorganization of both departments, enabling greater automation and improved incident management.
·
Enabled retail growth from 1 store to 70, including an issue triage and submission tool for retail staff integrated with Jira and Slack.
·
Designed, implemented, and launched a React Native iOS point-of-sale system with payment terminal integrations; led an ERP-connected barcoding rollout across the retail fleet that reduced inventory shrink over 3x. Named inventor on patent US20190215926A1.
PINCHme — Software Engineer, then Lead Software Engineer
Mar 2015 - Dec 2016
·
Led a full reimplementation of the platform; reduced 500ms+ response times to under 80ms through code, database, and caching optimization, and stabilized performance during 125k+ requests-per-minute flash sale events.
Education
B.S. Computer Science, Brooklyn College, 2014
Core competencies
Platform architecture and reusable module design; multi-tenant data isolation; software supply-chain security (SAST, SBOM, dependency pinning); FedRAMP authorization boundary documentation; Python, Django, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Ruby on Rails, Go; AWS, Azure; Playwright, event-driven architecture; engineering organization design
Lou Giacalone · Head of Platform Engineering
Nicholas Cathcart
ENGINEERING
Senior Software Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/nhcathcart
Full-stack engineer and technical lead specializing in scalable web applications, workflow automation, and cloud infrastructure. Works across Kaizen's federal delivery portfolio on multi-tenancy, agency identity integration, and Section 508 accessibility conformance.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Software Engineer
June 2026 - Present
·
Provides engineering leadership across federal delivery, including the National Archives platform unifying ticketing, events, and facility rental across eight Presidential Libraries.
·
Built the multi-tenancy foundation isolating each agency's data, and delivered enterprise single sign-on for agency staff.
·
Owns Section 508 and WCAG 2.2 AA conformance, including the automated accessibility tooling the engineering team runs against.
Avantos.ai — Software Engineer and Tech Lead
Aug 2024 - Jun 2026
·
Architected a visual workflow builder enabling no-code orchestration of complex business processes, and designed the Go API and service-layer architecture for workflow execution.
·
Led and managed a team of five engineers, owning sprint planning, technical prioritization, and delivery, and partnered with product and design to align technical execution to roadmap milestones.
·
Developed a custom expression compiler in Go transforming JSON expressions into native Go code or SQL queries; integrated AI features via Amazon Bedrock with streaming responses.
·
Configured enterprise single sign-on by integrating AWS ALB authentication with Google BeyondCorp zero trust; managed container deployments on Amazon ECS with PostgreSQL on RDS.
·
Implemented end-to-end observability across the React frontend and Go backend, established frontend testing practice with Vitest and Playwright, and resolved RDS scaling issues including IOPS bottlenecks and burst-balance depletion.
Arcus Digital — Co-Founder and CTO
2023 - 2024
·
Redesigned e-commerce platforms using Next.js and GraphQL, improving Core Web Vitals 67%; established CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, accelerating iteration cycles 21%.
·
Built internal tooling and templates that reduced project development timelines by 66%.
Qurie — Software Engineer
2022 - 2023
·
Migrated a legacy Electron application to functional React components with hooks and TypeScript, reducing feature development time and defect incidence; led a UI redesign and overhauled the backend development environment with Docker.
Education
Master's Degree, Rice University, 2013
Bachelor's Degree, Rice University, 2011
Core competencies
Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, Python; React, Next.js, Node.js; PostgreSQL, row-level multi-tenancy; AWS (ECS, RDS, EC2, Lambda, IAM), Docker, Terraform; SAML and OIDC federal identity integration (Microsoft Entra ID); Section 508 / WCAG 2.2 AA; automated accessibility auditing; Datadog, CI/CD, TDD
Nicholas Cathcart · Senior Software Engineer
Matthew Kohn
ENGINEERING
Incoming · Aug 2026Senior Software Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/matthew-kohn-129956b1
Software engineer with seven years building and operating high-scale, high-reliability systems, most recently owning global capacity, billing, and regional provisioning for a hyperscale managed database service. Completing a master's in urban data science alongside the role.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Software Engineer, Product
August 2026
·
Will own customer-facing features end to end across Kaizen's federal and municipal product surfaces.
·
Will shape architecture as the platform scales across thousands of jurisdictions, including the reusable, accessible components that adapt across agencies.
·
Will work across the recreation platform, the shared component library, and the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace supporting the Department of War.
Microsoft — Software Engineer II
2024 - Aug 2026
·
Primary owner of capacity for Azure's MySQL Flexible Server offering, covering global region infrastructure buildouts, regional capacity provisioning across 200,000+ servers, customer incident debugging and mitigation, and feature delivery (C#/.NET, SQL Server, PowerShell).
·
Implemented a compute placement scoring system during server provisioning to select the optimal availability zone, reducing zonal allocation failures for customers by 50%.
·
Onboarded the service to an automated quota management system that requests capacity enlargements for regions nearing exhaustion, reducing critical-severity capacity incidents by 33%.
·
Introduced a fix to existing billing infrastructure that recovered millions of dollars in monthly revenue; participated in the global on-call rotation, fielding hundreds of fleet and customer incidents.
TaxBit — Senior Software Engineer
2022 - 2024
Tax and accounting compliance and reporting platform for digital assets.
·
Scaled transaction synchronization to enterprise resource planning systems from hundreds of transactions per run to hundreds of thousands, enabling clients with millions of transactions to close their books.
·
Orchestrated design and implementation of a universal ERP integration API, connecting NetSuite, Xero, and 10+ other accounting systems and widening the addressable enterprise market.
·
Built a generalized integration ingestion system that reduced average time to add a new data-source integration from 3+ weeks to under one day.
Tactic (acquired by TaxBit) — Software Engineer
2021 - 2022
·
Joined as the third engineer and fifth employee; helped the company go from no product and no customers to a ~$70M valuation and acquisition within a year.
·
Became the in-house accounting domain expert and primary owner of the QuickBooks integration, and designed a journaling system processing tens of thousands of complex transactions.
Flatiron Health — Software Engineer
2019 - 2021
Oncology data company operating an EMR and research data platform.
·
Supported EMR and payments software ensuring oncology clinics were reimbursed on time and in full (C#/.NET, SQL Server, JavaScript); integrated a third-party claim-scrubbing API that reduced first-pass claim denial rates 42%.
Education
M.S. Urban Data Science, New York University, Center for Urban Science and Progress, 2026
Sc.B. Computer Science, Brown University, 2019
Core competencies
Python, C#/.NET, TypeScript/React, Java, SQL; Azure, AWS, Flask, Airflow, Terraform, Docker; PostgreSQL, MSSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch; capacity engineering and global provisioning; production on-call and incident mitigation; geospatial and civic analytics (ArcGIS Pro, SARIMA time-series, clustering and classification)
Matthew Kohn · Senior Software Engineer
Steven Huynh
ENGINEERING
Infrastructure Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/steven-huynh-281-330-8004-mj
Infrastructure engineer with 18 years across cloud migration, infrastructure-as-code, and security remediation. Owns Kaizen's AWS GovCloud platform and its accredited-environment deployment path, and does the hands-on scan clearing and control justification that federal authorization requires.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Infrastructure Engineer
March 2026 - Present
·
Owns Kaizen's AWS and AWS GovCloud platform, including the FedRAMP-aware Terraform module library every application repository builds on.
·
Runs the security remediation federal authorization requires, from vulnerability findings and written control justification to a FIPS-mode container fleet.
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Co-owns the FedRAMP authorization submission and the accredited-environment deployment path new agency work lands on.
Well.co — Senior DevOps Engineer
May 2025 - Mar 2026
·
Led Terraform upgrade and module refactoring across multi-account AWS environments, improving reliability, reducing configuration drift, and standardizing infrastructure patterns.
The New York Public Library — Senior DevOps Engineer
Mar 2023 - May 2025
·
Led the migration from CloudFormation to Terraform, architecting reusable modular provisioning patterns adopted organization-wide, and drove the rollout of GitHub Actions for CI/CD.
·
Managed patching strategy to reduce vulnerability windows, engineered disaster recovery using AWS Backup, and supported account consolidation to simplify governance and control costs.
LeafLink — Senior Cloud Engineer
Apr 2020 - Dec 2022
·
Contributed to migrating the core marketplace monolith from ECS to Kubernetes on EKS, improving scalability and deployment consistency; migrated core applications from CircleCI to GitHub Actions.
·
Re-architected the database sync pipeline, reducing run time 60%; implemented CDN cache pre-warming and decentralized Terraform using tag-based modules.
Casper — Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Nov 2016 - Mar 2020
·
First SRE hire; architected and led the migration of core applications from Heroku to AWS and introduced Terraform as the organization-wide infrastructure-as-code tool.
Earlier roles — Senior Test Engineer, Vimeo; SDET Lead, Group Commerce; QA Engineer, Meetup
Mar 2008 - Oct 2016
Education
B.A. Mass Communication, Theory, and Criticism, San Francisco State University
Core competencies
Terraform and infrastructure-as-code module design; AWS and AWS GovCloud (ECS, Fargate, RDS, KMS, SES, Backup, VPC); FIPS 140 mode container and runtime configuration; vulnerability scan remediation (Tenable Nessus, grype, trivy) and control justification; Kubernetes/EKS; GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure Pipelines; Cloudflare zero-trust access; CloudWatch, Datadog; disaster recovery and multi-account governance
Steven Huynh · Infrastructure Engineer
Patrick J. Hoyt
ENGINEERING
Quality Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/patrick-hoyt
Quality engineer with 12 years building test automation programs from scratch across mobile, web, and API surfaces. Owns Kaizen's automated end-to-end testing program and the quality gates that stop defective releases, and has found production authorization defects through systematic role auditing.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Quality Engineer
February 2026 - Present
·
Owns Kaizen's automated end-to-end testing program and the continuous-integration gates that stop defective releases.
·
Architected the agentic pull-request test-quality gate now live in the shared platform library, pairing coverage checks with a qualitative test-intent reviewer.
·
Turned accessibility enforcement from advisory reporting into failing assertions across the design system, and has caught production authorization defects through systematic role auditing.
Roots — Software Development Engineer in Test
Nov 2024 - Feb 2026
·
Served as quality lead for the engineering organization, reporting to the CTO with one direct report; developed and championed test strategy across teams through coaching, tooling, and framework adoption.
·
Implemented a Playwright UI automation suite for a new platform providing 100% coverage of critical end-to-end workflows and reducing manual regression time by over 10 hours per sprint.
·
Introduced Python API automation for REST and GraphQL, reducing manual testing time by over 75%, and integrated UI and API automation into Azure Pipelines for earlier, more reliable feedback.
Dataminr — Software Engineer in Test
Aug 2017 - Dec 2023
·
Mobile QA and automation lead; rewrote the Appium automation suite in Python, eliminating manual regression testing and reducing the test cycle by over 50%.
·
Oversaw API automation using Karate, catching regressions one to two days ahead of UI tests, and maintained Python Selenium web automation, eliminating flaky scripts and reducing run times.
·
Designed and built a Java/Kafka application for hydrating test environments with data, contributing toward $2.5M in annual test environment cost savings.
·
Built a test orchestration API for data pipelines using Python Flask and Kafka, providing pipeline visibility and observability where none existed and enabling end-to-end regression runs.
Dun & Bradstreet — Quality Assurance Engineer
Dec 2014 - Apr 2017
·
Automated search request validation to identify search server issues, and performed SQL validation of business data to ensure correct format and field mappings across downstream marketing and CRM systems.
Education
B.S. Management Information Systems, University of New Hampshire, 2011
Fullstack Academy of Code, 2017
Core competencies
Playwright, Selenium, Appium, Karate.js, Jest, Vitest; Python and JavaScript test automation; REST and GraphQL API automation; CI quality gating (Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions); automated accessibility assertion (axe, Storybook a11y); authorization and role-permission auditing; test strategy, mentoring, and quality program ownership; AWS, Azure, Docker, SQL
Patrick J. Hoyt · Quality Engineer
Shaham Noorani
ENGINEERING
Software Engineer, Forward Deployed | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/shahamn
Forward-deployed software engineer who works directly with agency stakeholders to turn mission requirements into shipped product. Builds across Kaizen's defense and civilian engagements, with depth in foreign military sales workflow, identity and access management, and federal security controls.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Software Engineer, Forward Deployed
April 2026 - Present
·
Builds application capability on the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace supporting a joint interagency task force, including the partner-nation and foreign military sales review workflow.
·
Owns the identity and access management surface and the federal security controls behind it: multi-factor authentication, FIPS-hardened images, and enterprise identity on AWS GovCloud.
·
Sits with agency stakeholders to turn mission requirements into shipped product, and has found and fixed authorization vulnerabilities in DoD-facing systems.
SchooLinks — Software Engineer
Jun 2024 - Apr 2026
Series B education technology platform serving 1,000+ K-12 districts and 6M students.
·
Architected and shipped a form completion agent enabling autofill across thousands of state-reporting forms, saving staff and students 10,000+ hours of manual data entry per semester and delivering the organization's first AI feature.
·
Designed and built geolocation-enabled timesheets with location-mismatch detection and staff heatmap visualization, supporting 20,000+ time logs so students receive credit for workforce placements.
·
Partnered with non-technical district staff across half a dozen custom development projects, owning requirements gathering through implementation and ongoing enablement.
·
Resolved 250+ production defects across the stack, turning around all critical and major issues within 8 and 24 hours respectively; collaborated with the CTO to establish agentic coding workflows adopted team-wide.
TeachingEntrepreneurship.org — Software Engineer
Mar 2024 - May 2024
·
Built AI-powered tooling for a course platform serving 5,000+ students, including assignment and presentation builders for educators and a mock interview simulator personalized per student project.
Dialexa (acquired by IBM) — Software Engineer Intern
Summers 2022 and 2023
·
Led an intern team of 15, owning mentoring, stakeholder requirements, architecture, and implementation of a volunteer management platform built from scratch.
·
Built a full-stack SAML authentication service for an enterprise accounting client, unifying identity across a $1B product suite.
I-Trial — Co-Founder
Jul 2021 - Nov 2021
Funded by UT Dell Medical School.
·
Founded, hired, and led a team of six engineers, owning architecture, sprint planning, and feature prioritization for a cross-facility clinical trial management platform.
Education
B.S. Computer Science, minor in Entrepreneurship, Texas A&M University
Core competencies
React, Next.js, Angular, TypeScript; Python, Django REST Framework, Node.js, C#/.NET, Java Spring Boot; PostgreSQL, MongoDB; AWS and AWS GovCloud; Keycloak, SAML, OIDC, TOTP multi-factor; FIPS-hardened container images; SAM.gov Entity Management API; agent framework design and LLM integration; accessibility (VPAT)
Shaham Noorani · Software Engineer, Forward Deployed
Jamie Goodin
ENGINEERING
Software Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/jamie-goodin-073816137
Full-stack engineer with production experience in HIPAA-regulated environments. Lead engineer on Kaizen's shared component and module library and its reference application, owning the tenant isolation and authentication layers that every federal deployment inherits.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Software Engineer
June 2026 - Present
·
Lead engineer on Kaizen's reusable component and module library and its reference application, the foundation every federal deployment inherits.
·
Built the row-level multi-tenancy layer isolating government tenants, and owns the authentication platform including enterprise single sign-on, Common Access Card support, and role- and attribute-based access control.
·
Delivered GovCloud and FIPS-mode hardening across the platform, including the cryptographic path that keeps the product working under federal configuration.
Surgical Safety Technologies — Full-Stack Software Engineer
Feb 2023 - Jun 2026
Operating-room analytics platform in a HIPAA-regulated environment.
·
Owned full-stack development from planning through deployment, collaborating with design, QA, and product to deliver solutions in a HIPAA-regulated environment.
·
Implemented secure authentication and role-based authorization systems ensuring data privacy and HIPAA compliance.
·
Designed and implemented a clipping interface for the video player enabling precise segmentation, and expanded core video annotation capabilities to improve annotation workflows.
·
Engineered high-performance endpoints using Python FastAPI and optimized SQL queries against complex health data relationships, enabling real-time analytics critical to operation scheduling.
·
Built an automated unit testing suite with Jest, increasing code coverage 40%; overhauled a 24/7 tablet kiosk application with WebSocket functionality for continuous real-time facility-server connectivity.
Independent projects — Developer
2022 - Present
·
Built and operate Ginkgo, a Discord and React application using the Cornell Lab eBird API to deliver bird sighting information, serving over 6,000 users across 100 communities; deployed as systemd units on a Linux VM for auto-restart resilience.
·
Built Yorkie, a transit tracking application providing schedule and alert information for all 472 stations in the New York City subway system.
Education
Master's in Landscape Architecture (candidate), Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2021-2022
B.A. Geology, Macalester College, 2017
Core competencies
TypeScript, Python, SQL; React, Redux, Vite, Tailwind, FastAPI, Flask; PostgreSQL row-level security and multi-tenant isolation; authentication and authorization (OIDC, SAML, CAC/PIV, RBAC/ABAC); FIPS 140 mode cryptographic configuration; AWS GovCloud; HIPAA-regulated development; Jest, Storybook; design-system engineering
Jamie Goodin · Software Engineer
Jaclyn Naomi Barrera
ENGINEERING
Incoming · Sept 2026Software Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/jaclynbarrera
Frontend and design engineer with 3+ years building for the public sector, including work for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Accessibility-first practitioner who shipped a 100+ component design system used across five agency teams and led a full frontend platform migration end to end.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Software Engineer
September 2026
·
Will own full-stack features from scoping through architecture, build, and iteration, with no handoffs.
·
Will build the AI-powered product surfaces: intake flows, constituent assistants, case routing, and agency operator dashboards.
·
Will work directly with federal agency stakeholders to turn requirements into product at government scale.
Independent — Freelance Frontend and Design Engineer
Oct 2025 - Present
·
Built a full-stack data visualization application processing a 114,000-record dataset through a Node.js/Express ETL pipeline with PostgreSQL, GraphQL, and React/D3.js.
Thoughtworks — Software Engineer, Developer Experience Team
Sep 2023 - Sep 2025
Client: United States federal agency.
·
Sole frontend engineer on a greenfield test user dashboard for a U.S. federal agency, surfacing data across Department of Veterans Affairs systems into a navigable interface that gave 100+ engineers confidence in QA and testing across lower-level environments, eliminating weeks of manual setup per team.
·
Owned the full frontend data layer, architecting filtering, pagination, and state management patterns that made complex, inconsistent data from 6+ integrated systems legible to end users.
·
Drove and led a full frontend migration from a Rails monolith to a React/TypeScript single-page application, making the technical and product case and owning implementation end to end.
·
Built background job workflows and asynchronous data pipelines using Redis, automating cross-service data flows and ensuring reliable data availability across environments.
Thoughtworks — Software Engineer, Design System Team
Mar 2023 - Sep 2023
Client: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
·
Helped ship a 100+ component React library and design token system used by 50+ engineers across 5+ teams building clinician-facing applications for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
·
Introduced automated accessibility linting, shifting WCAG compliance from manual audits to automated enforcement in the developer workflow.
·
Made independent design judgment calls in a designer-light environment, holding design coherence across the library, and raised the engineering bar through code review standards, Storybook documentation, and component API design.
Thoughtworks — Associate Software Engineer
Jan 2022 - Feb 2023
Client: US Coalition on Sustainability.
·
Built full-stack features in React, TypeScript, Kotlin, and PostgreSQL for a production networking platform, growing the active user base from 1,200 to 2,000+.
·
Led the accessibility initiative: conducted audits, prioritized the WCAG remediation backlog, introduced automated checks, and presented findings to stakeholders, measurably improving the platform accessibility grade.
Education
Software Engineering Bootcamp, Flatiron School, New York, NY
B.A. Political Science and Communications, Manhattan College
Core competencies
React, Next.js, TypeScript, Redux, Tailwind CSS, SASS; Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Kotlin, REST, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Redis; design systems, design tokens, component API design; accessibility-first UI and WCAG remediation, automated a11y linting; Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, RSpec, TDD; AWS, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Docker; Figma
Jaclyn Naomi Barrera · Software Engineer
Amogh Chaubey
ENGINEERING
Incoming · Sept 2026Software Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/amoghchaubey
Backend and distributed systems engineer who has shipped production infrastructure at scale, including a cross-network transfer capability now handling more than $15M in monthly throughput. Experienced in Kubernetes-based orchestration, enterprise configuration automation, and event-driven data pipelines.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Software Engineer
September 2026
·
Will own full-stack features end to end across Kaizen's federal and municipal product surfaces.
·
Will contribute to platform reliability and performance at government scale, and to the reusable components that adapt across agency deployments.
Cosmos Labs — Software Engineer, Incubations Team
Jul 2025 - Present
Series A company building enterprise-grade infrastructure for deploying and operating distributed networks.
·
Solo built and shipped a cross-network automated transfer capability in the company's routing API, coordinating multi-hop execution across independent networks while collapsing the user experience to a single signature; now handles more than $15M in monthly throughput.
·
Core contributor launching a Kubernetes-based network orchestration platform enabling enterprises to deploy, upgrade, and operate production networks without deep protocol expertise; built fleet management systems, upgrade coordination tooling, and ephemeral development-network automation.
·
Promoted within five months to a small founding team building a new product enabling tokenized deposits for financial institutions.
Fidelity Investments — Full Stack Software Engineering Intern
Jun 2024 - Aug 2024
·
Designed and built Ansible playbooks to asynchronously update 800+ Cisco devices across NX-OS and IOS infrastructure, achieving a 50% speedup over existing tooling.
·
Enforced configuration compliance and access controls adhering to enterprise security standards.
Fidelity Investments — Data Engineering Intern
Jun 2023 - Aug 2023
·
Architected event-driven data pipelines processing batches of 500+ customer data payloads in under three seconds.
·
Decoupled internal Java services using Kafka topics and asynchronous patterns, enabling independent scaling across the pipeline.
UConn Computational Biology Research Laboratory — Student Researcher
Spring 2023 - May 2025
·
Developed algorithms for reconciling gene and species trees under duplication-transfer-loss models, contributing to published software for studying gene family evolution.
·
Implemented a weighting scheme for gene tree parsimony that improved input processing efficiency 20%, validated against real microbial datasets.
Education
B.S. Computer Science, minor in Mathematics, University of Connecticut, 2025
Core competencies
Go, Python, Java, TypeScript, C++, SQL; Kubernetes, Docker, AWS ECS, Pulumi, Terraform-style IaC; PostgreSQL, Kafka, event-driven architecture; Next.js; Ansible and enterprise configuration automation; Grafana observability; distributed systems and fleet management
Amogh Chaubey · Software Engineer
Zachary Wilner
DATA
Data Lead | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/zacharywilner
Data and operations leader with eight years building analytics functions and data infrastructure from the ground up. Runs Kaizen's data intelligence function across automation, internal and external analytics, and AI enablement, and owns the data workstreams on the company's federal engagements.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Data Lead
November 2025 - Present
Promoted from Principal Data Analyst, June 2026.
·
Runs Kaizen's data intelligence function across automation, analytics, and AI enablement, and manages the data engineering team.
·
Owns the federal data workstreams, including reporting for the National Archives deployment and, on the Department of Education engagement, model evaluation, bias remediation, and the PII-scrubbing and synthetic-data architecture.
·
Built the internal source-of-truth system unifying customer data behind an agent interface, and drove the company-wide identity rollout.
Pair Eyewear — Head of Data, then Chief of Staff
Nov 2021 - Nov 2025
·
Recruited into a leadership role after developing a first-of-its-kind customer-centric attribution model as a consultant; built the data infrastructure, consumer research, and analytics functions from the ground up.
·
Oversaw a $1.5M budget, scaled the team from 0 to 8, and earned three promotions to Director of Data.
·
Supported the executive team on strategic growth initiatives including a $75M Series C raise, M&A projects, international expansion into the UK and Australia, and organizational restructuring.
RM Wilner Consulting — Founder and Data Consultant
Jun 2020 - Mar 2022
·
Developed data strategies and solutions for clients across consumer packaged goods, subscription services, and venture capital, building pipelines that improved marketing return on investment and reduced time to insight.
·
Conducted due diligence assessing unit economics and operational efficiency, delivering insights that informed acquisition strategy, including identifying customer segments with 30% higher lifetime value.
Bombas — Senior Data Analyst, Business Operations and Marketing
Jun 2019 - Nov 2021
·
Developed foundational data systems including a multi-touch attribution model that delivered a 15% lift in marketing efficiency and a predictive buying model driving repeat revenue.
·
Delivered data visualization training to 125 employees, improving data literacy and saving teams up to 15 hours per week; earned two promotions in three years as the company's go-to data expert.
Wayfair — Business Intelligence Analyst
Jul 2018 - Jun 2019
·
Launched and led analytics initiatives from scratch, developing infrastructure and custom data solutions that optimized logistics and supply chain processes, reduced warehouse stockouts 5%, and accelerated product speed to market.
Education
B.S. Management, Data Analytics and Information Systems, Boston College Carroll School of Management, summa cum laude
Core competencies
Data platform architecture and warehousing; dbt, Snowflake, Hex; SQL and Python; attribution and predictive modeling; LLM evaluation suites and bias remediation; PII scrubbing and synthetic data generation; workflow automation; identity and SSO governance; analytics team leadership and hiring
Zachary Wilner · Data Lead
Christopher Johnson
DATA
Data Engineer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/christopher-johnson99
Data engineer with five years building data infrastructure across high-volume consumer, healthcare, and insurance environments. Owns Kaizen's analytics delivery onto federal deployments, the data modeling for a Department of Education complaint-intake platform, and the internal automation tooling behind federal capture.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Data Engineer
June 2026 - Present
·
Delivers Kaizen's customer-facing analytics and insights module onto federal deployments, including the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace supporting a joint interagency task force.
·
Owns data modeling for the Department of Education complaint-intake platform, from model definition and infrastructure through migration and synthetic data generation.
·
Builds the internal agentic tooling the growth and delivery teams run on, including the federal opportunity screening and proposal-intelligence platform.
DraftKings — Data Engineer
Jul 2024 - Jun 2026
·
Designed and implemented processes to integrate, transform, and model complex data from diverse source systems through AWS S3, building financial data models tracking tens of billions of dollars of reinvestment spend.
·
Deployed ETL processes in Snowflake SQL and Python/Pandas orchestrated by Airflow DAGs, working with product owners and tech leads to enhance the reliability of critical financial reporting systems.
·
Led optimization and performance tuning across Snowflake and Databricks with analysis via Datadog, improving system efficiency and reliability.
·
Engineered several AI agents to give stakeholders a direct interface for querying and analyzing the team's data models.
Mass General Brigham — Analytics Engineer
May 2023 - Jul 2024
·
Worked within the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, contributing to strategic initiative discussions and developing curated data models for dashboards and analytics products.
·
Led data model development measuring 10 key performance indicators for the organization's fiscal year 2024 goals tracking dashboard.
·
Operated as the sole engineer across multiple domain teams, applying agile practice and collaborating across organizational levels.
·
Automated ETL processing including cloud ingestion, restructuring source data from EPIC electronic health record models for stakeholder consumption using dbt, Snowflake, and Tableau; assisted migration from on-premises servers to cloud architecture.
Gallagher Re — Reinsurance Analyst
Jul 2021 - May 2023
·
Processed and transformed raw claims data using Python and PySpark; automated stream and batch processing of client data with data teams across the company.
·
Generated business insights through Power BI dashboards prepared for client-facing deliverables.
Education
B.A. Statistics and B.A. History, University of Chicago, 2021
Core competencies
Python, PySpark, SparkSQL, SQL; Snowflake, Databricks, PostgreSQL, MySQL; dbt, Apache Airflow, Docker, Terraform, GCP, AWS S3; Power BI, Tableau; data modeling, migration, and quality management; LLM application development and agentic tooling; synthetic data generation; healthcare (EPIC EHR), financial, and high-volume consumer data environments
Christopher Johnson · Data Engineer
Daman Chatha
DESIGN
Design Lead | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/damanjotchatha
Design leader with eight years across consumer product, government, and enterprise consulting. Leads Kaizen's product design organization and its federal portfolio. At The New York Times, set accessibility guidance for screen readers and dynamic type that four additional teams adopted.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Design Lead
January 2025 - Present
Promoted to Design Lead, July 2026.
·
Leads Kaizen's product design organization, owning design hiring, team management, and the standards the company designs against.
·
Drives design across the federal portfolio, including the Department of Veterans Affairs veteran portal, homepage redesign, and information architecture consolidation.
·
Owns accessibility practice across delivered work, and the Kaizen brand and launch communications.
The New York Times — Senior Product Designer
Apr 2021 - Jan 2025
·
Launched Audio, the Times' first new product in a decade, to over 10 million subscribers, strengthening engagement with the broader ecosystem.
·
Established comprehensive accessibility guidance for screen readers and dynamic type, setting a standard adopted by four additional teams.
·
Partnered with product, engineering, research, and editorial to scope, design, test, and implement high-impact initiatives including search, share, offline, onboarding, and toolkit improvements.
·
Led multi-week discovery sprints with senior leadership to drive product improvements aimed at weekly active users, managing competing perspectives and an ambiguous vision to validated hypotheses.
United States Digital Response — Volunteer Design Researcher
Mar 2024 - Present
·
Led a 16-week engagement with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management improving the client intake process through user research, data standardization, and process optimization for city employees and analysts serving people experiencing homelessness.
Accenture — User Experience Designer
Apr 2019 - Mar 2021
·
Embedded within client teams at Bose, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State Farm, GE, and Pfizer to develop mobile and web solutions across the product life cycle.
·
Led a design engagement with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to improve the country's first COVID-19 contact tracing program, facilitating discovery workshops, auditing the existing system, and delivering recommendations benefiting 1,300+ contact tracers.
Additional experience — Teaching Fellow, Tufts University; UX Mentor, America on Tech; Harvard GSD
2019 - 2022
Education
B.S. Community Regional Development and Public Health, University of California, Davis, 2018
d.mba, part-time course in business strategy for designers, 2023
Core competencies
Design leadership, hiring, and team management; Figma; user research and usability testing; accessibility standards for screen readers and dynamic type; design systems; information architecture and interaction design; data-informed design and A/B testing; prototyping and facilitation; UX writing; government service design
Daman Chatha · Design Lead
Ivy Li
DESIGN
Senior Product Designer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/ivylitao
Product and service designer with five years designing government digital services at federal, state, and municipal levels, including a national intelligence agency, two state agencies, and New York City. Contributes design leadership across Kaizen's federal portfolio.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Product Designer
March 2026 - Present
·
Provides design leadership across Kaizen's federal portfolio, including the National Archives ticketing platform spanning eight Presidential Libraries and museums.
·
Runs discovery directly with agency stakeholders and designs both sides of the product: the public purchase experience and the staff administrative experience.
·
Feeds agency-specific requirements back into the shared component library so they become reusable platform capability.
Deloitte, Government and Public Services — UX/UI and Service Designer
Jun 2022 - Mar 2026
·
Client, national intelligence agency: led design for a mission-critical travel platform supporting 10,000+ employees, driving product vision for trip planning, approval, and reservations through weekly workshops with agency leadership; directed creative strategy and usability testing across 400+ screens, earning an agency award for Outstanding Accessibility.
·
Client, Colorado Department of Labor and Employment: designed the digital and paper filing experience for the state's Paid Family and Medical Leave program, enabling distribution of $687 million in benefits across more than 135,000 claims; directed UX and content for employer audit features enforcing accurate wage reporting, facilitating client meetings on accessibility, plain language, and development feasibility.
·
Client, Oregon Department of Justice: modernized the child support caseworker portal serving 129,500 cases, built and scaled the design system across three development phases, and authored a 70+ page UI standards document guiding portal refactoring and developer handoff.
·
Client, New York City Department of Social Services: sole designer for the city's housing subsidy application portal, translating complex policy requirements into actionable designs for landlords, caseworkers, and public servants.
Utah Governor's Office of Planning and Budget — UX/UI Design Fellow
Jun 2021 - Aug 2021
·
Sole designer for a new performance measurement portal serving 36 Utah state agencies and 280+ programs; launched features for creating, reporting, and tracking measure data, and led UX research with constituents to align design with user feedback and legislative requirements.
New America — Designer and User Researcher
Sep 2020 - Mar 2021
·
Sole designer and researcher for the Public Interest Technology University Network; prototyped a job board for students and early-career professionals in an agile development cycle.
·
Interviewed 40+ industry professionals and authored a 50-page report on public interest technology career pathways, presenting findings at the 2020 network convening.
Education
B.A. Architecture and Design, cum laude, Yale University, 2021
Korean Language Program, Ewha Woman's University, Seoul (Richard U. Light Fellowship)
International Chinese Language Program, National Taiwan University (Richard U. Light Fellowship)
Core competencies
Figma, Sketch, InVision; wireframing and prototyping; WCAG accessibility and usability testing; design systems and UI standards authoring; service design and policy translation; design for generative AI; graphics, illustration, and branding; HTML/CSS; federal, state, and municipal government service design
Ivy Li · Senior Product Designer
Carlos Lim
DESIGN
Senior Product Designer | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/carlosalim7
Product designer with four years designing enterprise-scale operational systems, most recently as head of design for Amazon's inbound supply chain and information architecture governor for its supplier portal, where the work netted over $600M in operational savings. Now designs across four federal engagements at Kaizen.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Product Designer
August 2026 - Present
·
Designs across four federal engagements, including the Department of Veterans Affairs public experience and design review on the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace.
·
Built the Social Security Administration experience exploration that opened the agency collaboration.
·
Contributes discovery, journey mapping, and components back to the shared federal component library.
Amazon — Sr. Product Designer; previously UX Designer II and UX Designer
2023 - Aug 2026
Supply Chain Optimization Technology (SCOT). New York, NY 2025-2026; Bellevue, WA 2023-2025.
·
Head of design for Amazon inbound systems and information architecture governor for the Vendor Central supplier portal, covering collaborative planning and forecasting, global logistics, and internal capacity and labor planning across the EU, UK, and North American markets. The tools reach 200,000+ associates, 400+ fulfillment center sites, and 70,000 retail vendors.
·
Delivered design solutions netting more than $600M in retail entitlement operational savings.
·
Built a knowledge base and design agent system enabling non-design partners to develop high-quality experiences through natural language prompting.
·
Drove an organization-wide transition to a new internal design system supporting AI-driven development through improved tooling integration, earning unanimous VP-level approval across three organizations.
·
Member of the AI Product Design leadership group steering the future of the UX and product design roles; recipient of Spotlight and Ownership awards for 2025 product development.
University of California, Irvine — Student Center and Event Services — UX Designer II; previously UX Designer
2022 - 2023
·
Created high-fidelity mockups for internal stakeholders and planned development of an internal personnel directory against defined business objectives.
·
Collaborated with developers on a simplified onboarding flow for student center new hires.
Leland — Design Coach
2025 - Present
·
Supported 30+ individuals worldwide in securing continued design education and industry UX positions.
Education
B.S. Informatics, specialization in Human-Computer Interaction, University of California, Irvine, 2023 — Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa
Core competencies
Figma and interaction design tooling; enterprise and operational systems design; information architecture governance; design systems and design token conformance; AI-driven product design and design agent tooling; design coaching and mentorship; prototyping; frontend contribution (React component library)
Carlos Lim · Senior Product Designer
Mac Marrone
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Head of Customer Operations | Kaizen · Veteran
linkedin.com/in/macmarrone
Operations executive with 12 years as a United States Navy Surface Warfare Officer, followed by senior roles at Meta and Dataminr directing teams of up to 240 people and budgets of $50M. Owns customer deployment and support at Kaizen across the municipal parks and recreation base and federal programs, including the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Presidential Libraries and a counter-unmanned aircraft systems marketplace for a joint interagency task force under the Department of War.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Head of Customer Operations
March 2026 - Present
·
Directs deployment and support across the municipal and federal portfolio, including the National Archives Presidential Libraries program, and designed the customer-support model federal accounts run on.
·
Set the deployment and training approach agencies are onboarded through, built around agency review windows rather than vendor timelines.
·
Drove the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace to public launch alongside Army and AWS counterparts, and stood up the credentialing and training process for staff supporting the engagement.
Dataminr — Senior Director, Operations
May 2020 - May 2024
Real-time event and risk detection platform
·
Led a 35-person global team responsible for real-time risk discovery decisions, dataset acquisition, alert automation, and knowledge-graph maintenance.
·
Supported $1M+ contracts covering 50% of the Fortune 100 and large public sector organizations.
Meta — Head of New Product Launches
April 2018 - May 2020
·
Built and led a team of 10 program managers covering commerce inventory and seller moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
·
Directed 2,200 contractors and a $50M annual budget; cut annual spend 10% ($5M) by removing system inefficiencies.
United States Navy — Surface Warfare Officer (final role: Director of Operations / Chief of Staff, Destroyer Squadron)
September 2006 - April 2018
·
As Director of Operations and Chief of Staff for a $3.5B squadron of 3,200+ personnel and 11 organizations, led a staff of 20 managers and chaired daily deployment operations meetings, running 38 cross-functional international projects across three continents with a 100% mission accomplishment rate.
·
As Director of Operations aboard USS Harpers Ferry (LSD 49), led 11 managers and 70 technicians responsible for all shipboard weapons, radars, communications paths, and computer networks on a ship of 800+ personnel; completed pre-deployment training in under half the allotted time and certified the ship in nine warfare areas.
·
Received a leadership award from Naval Surface Forces, the senior Surface Navy command.
Military service
United States Navy, 12 years, Surface Warfare Officer. Three ships and four seven-month deployments; final assignment as Director of Operations / Chief of Staff for a destroyer squadron of 3,200+ personnel. United States Naval Academy graduate.
Education
BS, Robotics and Control Engineering, United States Naval Academy
MBA, Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management
Core competencies
Customer operations leadership; federal and municipal software deployment; program governance and schedule management; authority-to-operate coordination; customer support model design; cross-functional team leadership; risk and escalation management; vendor and partner management
Mac Marrone · Head of Customer Operations
Jared Carrow
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Customer Success Manager | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/jared-carrow-537b99183
Customer success professional with more than a decade in client-facing roles at Apple, Vacasa, and Ripe, including eight years carrying sales quota. Kaizen's first hire into the function, managing live government accounts after they transition out of deployment - counties, cities, and tribal nations running parks, campgrounds, and recreation programs.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Customer Success Manager
October 2025 - Present
·
Owns live government accounts after they transition out of deployment: counties, cities, and tribal nations running parks, campgrounds, and recreation programs.
·
Handles post-launch configuration and financial operations, from general-ledger structure and payout reporting to refunds, reconciliation, and automated revenue reporting.
·
Wrote the support model agencies are handed at go-live, and is the escalation path from customers into engineering on-call.
Ripe — Client Success Manager
May 2023 - October 2025
White-labeled lodging and booking engine embedded by destinations, event organizers, and resorts
·
Managed a book of 34 clients, owning annual contract renewals, upsell, and quarterly strategic planning informed by account analytics.
·
Built and rolled out the company's client health scoring system, and project-managed the launch of new client campaigns and promotions.
·
Ran monthly client meetings and training sessions to raise product adoption, and worked across sales, operations, marketing, and product on account outcomes.
Vacasa — Sales Executive
November 2021 - May 2023
Vacation rental management company
·
Promoted from Sales Development Representative to Sales Executive within the first year.
·
Ran consultative end-to-end sales cycles with homeowners from warm and cold leads, including objection handling and contract negotiation.
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Built a referral network of real estate partners and sourced local operations teams to support newly signed properties.
Apple Inc. — Genius Admin, Genius Bar Operations
May 2015 - November 2021
·
Managed repair queue workflow and turnaround time, coordinating with offsite repair centers and tracking daily parts inventory for the technician team.
·
Served as the customer point of contact for repair status, pickup, and escalation of unresolved repair and system issues to internal teams.
·
Audited technician documentation and inventory allocation daily and communicated policy changes across the team.
Education
Bachelor of Arts, Religion, Faith International University, 2017
Core competencies
Customer success and account management; government account retention and renewals; payment reconciliation and financial reporting; product configuration; support process design and documentation; defect triage and engineering escalation; HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Jira
Jared Carrow · Customer Success Manager
Maureen Boyer
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Customer Support Manager | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/maureen-boyer-5301b392
Public-sector software specialist with eight years supporting government agencies, including six at Mark43 implementing records and compliance systems for law enforcement, and a year as a public information officer on a USAID justice-sector program in Haiti. Owns the customer help desk and escalation path at Kaizen for county, municipal, and state park agencies, and trains agency staff on configuration, reporting, and reservation workflows. Fluent in French and Haitian Creole.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Customer Support Manager
October 2024 - Present
·
Owns the customer help desk and escalation path for county, municipal, and state park agencies, reproducing defects and driving them to engineering fixes.
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Delivers training and configuration support to government staff across the recreation portfolio, from new-administrator onboarding through go-live preparation.
·
Authored the majority of Kaizen's help center library, and built the support priority matrix that formalizes the issue-to-resolution path.
Mark43 — Senior Product Consultant; previously Product Specialist and Customer Helpdesk Specialist
Aug 2018 - Oct 2024
Public safety software provider delivering records management and computer-aided dispatch systems to law enforcement agencies.
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Led technical implementation and onboarding for more than 30 agency clients against federal compliance requirements, configuring field and feature options to project deadlines.
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Served as subject matter expert on records management and compliance reporting, including National Incident-Based Reporting System submissions, and supported the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police department.
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Ran training sessions for new agency clients to drive adoption, and worked with product and engineering to turn field observations into product improvements.
·
Provided first- and second-line technical support to public safety clients, carrying up to five concurrent implementations.
Maximus — Bilingual Field Client Service Representative
Dec 2017 - Aug 2018
Government services contractor administering health and human services programs.
·
Delivered face-to-face health plan enrollment to over 100 clients across two Medicaid offices, and ran telephone outreach campaigns converting at a 25% enrollment rate.
USAID-PROJUSTICE — Public Information Officer
Jan 2012 - Dec 2012
United States Agency for International Development justice-sector reform program, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
·
Drafted weekly, monthly, and quarterly progress reports to USAID headquarters on program projects.
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Conducted hundreds of judicial surveys with incarcerated individuals and 50 community leader interviews for the program's research study, quantifying results and establishing local partnerships.
·
Implemented community outreach campaigns across 12+ neighborhoods for mediation programs.
Independent and earlier roles — Translation and communications services for nonprofits; secondary and middle school teaching, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
2010 - 2017
Education
B.A. International Studies, minor in French and Francophone Studies, Dickinson College
M.B.A., Quantic School of Business and Technology
Core competencies
Government customer implementation and onboarding; help desk and escalation management; platform configuration; compliance and regulatory reporting (NIBRS); end-user training and enablement; knowledge base authoring; public-sector program reporting and field research; French and Haitian Creole
Maureen Boyer · Customer Support Manager
Margo Mitchell
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Deployment Strategist | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/margomitchell1204
Seven years in implementation and customer operations, including four and a half years at Campspot running full-cycle reservation system rollouts for the Pacific West market. At Kaizen, carries a portfolio of municipal and county recreation deployments from kickoff through go-live, covering data ingestion, payment configuration, financial reconciliation, and staff training. Also building end-user documentation for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Presidential Libraries ticketing product.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Deployment Strategist
November 2025 - Present
·
Carries municipal and county recreation deployments from kickoff through go-live, covering data ingestion, payment configuration, financial reconciliation, and staff training.
·
Led the City of Flagstaff rollout, the city's first self-service digital reservation system, spanning facility reservations, programs, memberships, point of sale, and general-ledger reporting into city financials.
·
Builds the end-user training documentation for Kaizen's National Archives ticketing product with the federal deployment team.
Campspot — Market Manager, Pacific West
Mar 2021 - Jul 2025
Reservation technology platform for outdoor hospitality
·
Managed full-cycle reservation system implementation for new clients from kickoff to launch, including platform adoption and confidence-building with client staff.
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Partnered with cross-functional teams to produce learning content — videos, modules, and interactive materials — tailored to different audiences.
·
Tracked bugs, features, and deployment status in JIRA, Confluence, HubSpot, and Asana.
·
Identified partnership opportunities that expanded client reach.
Campspot — Marketplace Operations Lead
Mar 2021 - Dec 2023
·
Stood up an offshore support team from scratch, owning onboarding, documentation, and performance processes.
·
Rebuilt internal training and development materials, improving learning workflows across departments.
·
Designed digital content that drove a 62% year-over-year increase in engagement with company tools.
EDUStaff LLC — Employee Services Lead
Mar 2019 - Mar 2021
K-12 education staffing provider
·
Supported full-cycle employment operations across multiple states, including background checks, payroll adjustments, and staffing coordination.
·
Worked with HR on onboarding, offboarding, and employee transitions, keeping documentation, system updates, and policy compliance current.
Education
Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Video Production, Magna Cum Laude, Western Michigan University, 2019
Core competencies
Implementation and go-live management; data ingestion and migration; payments and Stripe account configuration; financial reconciliation and reporting; end-user training and documentation; customer escalation management; JIRA; Confluence; Asana; HubSpot
Margo Mitchell · Deployment Strategist
Nico Turk
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Deployment Strategist | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/nicoturk
Client strategy and delivery specialist with seven years in management consulting and consumer insights at Vantage Partners and Human-ology, most recently managing a four-person team and 10-15 accounts representing $2M in annual revenue. Runs implementations across Kaizen's municipal and federal portfolio, including the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Presidential Libraries, the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, Ventura County, Breckenridge, and Flagstaff.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Deployment Strategist
January 2026 - Present
·
Owns deployment on the National Archives Presidential Libraries program, producing the contract deliverable set and driving configuration, audit preparation, and the integrations that gate launch.
·
Delivers municipal go-lives and post-launch stabilization, then hands accounts to customer success.
·
Built the delivery timeline and project management plan for the Department of Education engagement, and ran discovery in Washington, DC.
Human-ology — Senior Client Strategist
June 2021 - January 2026
Consumer insights and research consultancy
·
Managed a four-person team delivering work and account growth across 10-15 clients in tech, CPG, music, non-profit, and media, representing $2M in annual revenue.
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Doubled annual subscription size on three of the firm's largest accounts by selling into new brand teams at two major CPG companies and expanding research scope for a global technology client.
·
Built new analytic frames on existing consumer sentiment data, creating applications for audience definition, tension identification, and longitudinal tracking of priority segments.
·
Led pitch, proposal, negotiation, and onboarding for inbound and outbound sales, and ran recurring workshops and trainings to align the firm-wide client management approach.
Vantage Partners — Consultant
July 2019 - May 2021
Management consultancy focused on alliances, negotiation, and organizational change
·
Managed a seven-person team delivering a $1.2M organizational transformation engagement in six months, owning project plans, client updates, interview facilitation, and deliverable creation on the alliance management workstream.
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Led iterative design of an early-stage equity investment strategy for a multinational biopharma client, handing over evaluation criteria, deal-making workflow from diligence through post-close, and long-term monitoring tools.
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Coordinated shipment of $500K in materials supporting 250 training sessions over nine weeks across 40 countries, coordinating daily with client, vendors, trainers, local staff, and customs officials.
·
Built the research case for university-industry collaboration with a top research university and its commercial partners, including project design, hypothesis testing, and expert interviews.
Education
Bachelor of Arts, Economics and International Development, Dartmouth College, 2019
Core competencies
Government software implementation; federal deliverable production and review; payment and financial configuration; discovery and requirements gathering; project scheduling and risk tracking; account handoff to support; client strategy and stakeholder management; Tableau, SQL-adjacent tooling, Qualtrics
Nico Turk · Deployment Strategist
Vivian Ellis
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Deployment Strategist | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/vivian-c-ellis
Three years building and deploying software for enterprise and public-sector users, beginning as a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir Technologies across life sciences, hospital operations, and telecommunications. At Kaizen, works federal civilian engagements including VA.gov modernization for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and complaint intake for the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Day-to-day focus is discovery, scope definition, and alignment across agency product teams and prime contractors.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Deployment Strategist
March 2026 - Present
·
Runs discovery and implementation across Kaizen's federal portfolio, including the Department of Veterans Affairs VA.gov modernization effort.
·
Negotiated the working model with VA leadership that split component ownership between Kaizen and VA product teams, and holds weekly scope control across the workstreams.
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Contributes requirements and MVP definition on the Department of Education complaint-intake engagement.
Palantir Technologies — Forward Deployed Engineer
2023 - 2025
·
Built an automated resolution process for a telecommunications company's misfiled expenses, managing a team of three and resolving over $3 million in expenses.
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Developed a GxP-compliant platform for AI-enhanced drug modeling, working directly with scientists on feature prioritization and rolling out to 30+ modelers.
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Scoped, designed, and built features generating optimized hospital staffing schedules for major hospital systems across two states; embedded on day and night shifts as primary client liaison and led nurse training sessions.
·
Led a weeklong bootcamp for 100 engineers in Hyderabad, India, later published as an official Palantir course.
Zohran for NYC — Volunteer Field Lead
Fall 2025
New York City mayoral campaign
·
Led canvassing sessions of up to 100 volunteers, preparing turf assignments and materials and running trainings.
·
Built and sustained a volunteer community through in-person coaching during door-knocking operations.
Credera — Technical Consulting Intern
Summer 2022
Global technology consulting firm
·
Built web application features tracking and predicting popularity of emerging technologies.
·
Piloted containerized development over local development and presented findings to executives, prompting a company-wide shift.
Meta — Software Engineering Intern
Summer 2021
·
Developed a web-based onboarding system letting teams across Facebook set up their own Knowledge Base workspaces.
·
Launched a new Knowledge Base homepage design for the customer service organization.
Google — Software Engineering Intern
Summer 2020
·
Designed and built a web application for finding, saving, and sharing socially distanced local activities.
·
Oversaw development of identity features: authentication, profiles, saved interests, and friends.
Education
Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, minor in History, Rice University, 2023
Core competencies
Federal deployment and implementation; requirements discovery and scope definition; government stakeholder management; product management; design system and accessibility coordination; Python; TypeScript; React; SQL; PySpark
Vivian Ellis · Deployment Strategist
Kara Vohra
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Deployment Strategist | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/kara-vohra-601633201
Three years delivering AI and workflow systems in enterprise and public-sector environments, including two and a half years at IBM Consulting as a Data Scientist and AI Consultant, where responsible-AI governance workshops reached more than 100 NYPD officers and stakeholders. At Kaizen, runs state and local government launches spanning the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) parks program and Pima, York, and San Mateo counties, and supports the counter-UAS platform built for a joint interagency task force under the Department of War. Strength is turning customer constraints into configurations that agency staff actually adopt.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Deployment Strategist
March 2026 - Present
·
Runs state and local government launches, including the Maryland Department of Natural Resources state parks day-use rollout and county deployments across Pima, York, and San Mateo.
·
Turns customer constraints into configurations agency staff actually adopt, from QR-code park entry to advance booking replacing cash collection.
·
Supports the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace built for a joint interagency task force under the Department of War.
IBM Consulting — Data Scientist and AI Consultant
Aug 2023 - Mar 2026
·
Designed and led 10+ responsible-AI governance workshops for 100+ NYPD officers and stakeholders, establishing governance principles that shaped AI guardrails and agentic system design.
·
Led current-state assessments across 6+ parallel workstreams inside IBM Marketing, identified savings upwards of $15M, and acted as the communication bridge between the CIO organization and IBM Consulting.
·
Supported a multi-year $20M engagement designing PepsiCo's PepGenX enterprise AI platform, consolidating fragmented AI tools into a single centralized platform.
·
Owned roadmap and wave planning, feasibility-driven prioritization, and delivery execution across end-to-end AI project lifecycles.
TWOS.net — Growth Lead
May 2025 - Sept 2025
Early-stage consumer software platform
·
Built the initial growth strategy and a three-month rollout roadmap defining an in-real-life to digital acquisition motion.
·
Executed the first flagship in-person activation with 100+ participants, contributing to a sustained 15% lift in weekly active users.
·
Co-defined company operating principles with the executive team around trust and repeat participation.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, Finance (minor in Law), Summa Cum Laude, University of Pittsburgh, 2023
Core competencies
Government deployment and implementation; responsible AI governance; requirements shaping and workflow design; payments and Stripe configuration; customer training and adoption; vendor evaluation; JIRA; Azure DevOps; Power BI; Tableau; Postman
Kara Vohra · Deployment Strategist
Michael Salib
DEPLOYMENT & CUSTOMER OPERATIONS
Deployment Strategist | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/salibmichael
Program manager with eight years delivering complex technical work for government and commercial clients, from a $5.2M federal partnership spanning 60+ universities at BMNT to a multi-year AWS data warehouse build at Double Line. Holds the Project Management Professional credential. Runs schedule, scope, and stakeholder coordination across Kaizen's deployment portfolio, including the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) digital modernization engagement, Ventura County, and Maryland's state natural resources agency.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Deployment Strategist
June 2026 - Present
·
Coordinates the Department of Veterans Affairs veteran-facing portal modernization alongside the prime and VA design and development teams, including the Section 508 accessibility review and the daily feedback cycle.
·
Owns schedule, scope, and dependency management on the engagement, and escalates resourcing and scope risk before schedule commitments are made.
·
Supports municipal deployments in parallel, covering post-launch and configuration work across county and state accounts.
Double Line — Project Manager
May 2023 - June 2026
Data engineering and analytics consultancy serving public sector clients
·
Delivered a multi-year AWS data warehouse and query portal, compressing a three-year backlog into 12 months while managing six data and software engineers through the backend ETL build on Apache Airflow and SAML SSO integration.
·
Developed and implemented a new data standard, then upsold support enhancements that secured a 20% increase in project funding and set up a follow-on analytics proposal.
·
Delivered a 40% error reduction on data affecting $800M in reporting-agency revenue, producing a governance framework cataloging 40+ data elements and bringing error rates under the state-required 5% threshold.
·
Managed a $1M+ budget at 50% profitability and secured a follow-on annual support contract funding two full-time positions.
BMNT, Inc. — Project Lead (previously Senior Analyst, Program Analyst)
May 2018 - May 2023
Defense innovation firm behind the Hacking for Defense program
·
Strategized and executed a $5.2M+ federal agency-university partnership spanning 60+ universities and 1,000+ personnel, acting as primary contact across government, university, and non-profit stakeholders.
·
Led a team of six across planning, Agile ceremonies, and CRM management, coordinating software and data engineering workstreams with sales counterparts to surface risk and hold delivery timelines.
·
Piloted a manufacturing pipeline using an algorithmic pricing marketplace of 3,000+ vendors to resolve a 10,000+ part backorder and reduce reliance on traditional vendors.
·
Built a part search and tracking tool and worked with subject matter experts to inform disbursement of $1M in funding.
Education
Bachelor of Arts & Sciences, Political Science (International), Boston College, 2018
Core competencies
Federal program and project management; Agile and hybrid delivery; schedule and dependency management; multi-stakeholder coordination across government primes and subcontractors; Section 508 accessibility coordination; scope and risk escalation; P&L and budget management; Project Management Professional (PMP); Professional Scrum Master I; Jira, Asana, Notion, Confluence
Michael Salib · Deployment Strategist
Sean O'Donnell
FEDERAL GROWTH & CAPTURE
Senior Director of Growth | Kaizen · Veteran
linkedin.com/in/seanodonnell04
Federal growth executive with more than 20 years building defense business, most recently standing up the Army market as a seed-stage hire at Rune Technologies and previously closing the largest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deal in the Department of Defense. Contributes capture strategy and senior stakeholder access across Kaizen's federal portfolio, including the counter-UAS marketplace built for a joint interagency task force.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Director of Growth
June 2026 - Present
·
Contributes capture strategy and senior military access across Kaizen's Department of War portfolio, including the counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems marketplace built for a joint interagency task force.
·
Opens and works senior Army relationships, translating program-office feedback into product direction for the marketplace.
·
Runs campaign planning and stakeholder mapping across Army commands with Kaizen's outside advisers.
Rune Technologies — Growth Director
2025 - 2026
Seed-stage defense software company building military sustainment solutions.
·
Seed-stage hire tasked with establishing the company's Army account; achieved 168% quota attainment in the first year and closed the company's first seven-figure deals.
·
Used a Direct-to-Phase II SBIR award to establish a path to a Phase III OTA, and secured award-ready eligibility on AAL DevX Autonomy and the CDAO Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace.
·
Established a CRADA with CASCOM and DEVCOM C5ISR to shape sustainment data standards, and drove inclusion in NGC2 as the only sustainment application supporting both prototypes.
Oracle Government Defense & Intelligence — Senior Cloud Account Executive
2024 - 2025
·
Led a matrixed sales, business development, and engineering team that won both competitively sourced JWCC contracts awarded to the U.S. Army in 2024.
·
Exceeded quota at 120% in the first year and closed the largest five-year Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deal in the Department of Defense.
VMware by Broadcom — Account Director
2019 - 2024
·
Averaged 179% quota attainment over six consecutive fiscal halves across U.S. Air Force, Army, and Fourth Estate accounts.
·
Owned end-to-end services sales strategy for global Army and Fourth Estate territories and oversaw the Army's VMware Enterprise License Agreement professional services benefits program.
Booz Allen Hamilton — Lead Associate
2012 - 2019
·
Led a team of 23 managers and individual contributors supporting Department of Defense clients across the National Capital Region.
·
Led the Secretary of Defense Communications office capture lifecycle, doubling contract size from 5 to 10 FTE and winning a 20+ FTE IT recompete within three years.
Military service
United States Air Force, 20 years active duty and Reserve (2004-2024). Fully qualified Aircraft Maintenance Officer for low observable and air refueling aircraft; retired serving as Military Chief of Staff to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy.
Education
M.A., emphasis in International Relations, University of Oklahoma
B.A., History, Virginia Military Institute
Certificate, Change Management Advanced Practitioner, Georgetown University
Project Management Professional (PMP), Project Management Institute
Core competencies
Federal capture management; Department of War and Army account strategy; non-traditional acquisition including OTA, SBIR Phase III, and CRADA; systems integrator and channel partnerships; pipeline architecture and CRM operations; senior military stakeholder engagement; counter-UAS and autonomous systems market
Sean O'Donnell · Senior Director of Growth
Jake Castillo
FEDERAL GROWTH & CAPTURE
Senior Director of Growth | Kaizen · Veteran
linkedin.com/in/jacobcastillo
Growth executive with 24 years spanning military service and enterprise software. Led U.S. Army and Marine Corps solutions at C3 AI for four years, closing roughly $20M in annual defense contract value across direct and prime-led pursuits. Develops Department of War opportunities at Kaizen and builds the technical question sets and working prototypes behind them.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Director of Growth
July 2026 - Present
·
Develops Department of War demand across the Navy, Marine Corps, and Defense Logistics Agency.
·
Owns bid strategy on federal solicitations, from the government question set and compliance read through the bid recommendation and opportunity assessment.
·
Builds the working prototypes taken into federal meetings and incorporated into proposal submissions.
C3.AI — Head of U.S. Army and Marine Corps Solutions
Aug 2022 - Jul 2026
Enterprise AI software company.
·
Closed approximately $20M in annual defense contract value across direct and prime-led pursuits with the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army RCCTO and PEO IEW&S, DCSA, and Lockheed Martin, including a $9M ARR Marine Corps AI manpower platform.
·
Negotiated a partnership with a top-tier federal systems integrator that opened access to 100+ program offices and created a repeatable contracting pathway.
·
Ran capture and commercial strategy on 30+ federal pursuits, owning value proposition, pricing structure, and proposal compliance for AI/ML platform deals.
·
Structured teaming agreements with Lockheed Martin, ECS, and Northrop Grumman and led joint go-to-market and delivery on awards for Next Gen C2, the Army Intelligence Data Platform, and the Joint Fires Network.
Military service
United States Marine Corps, 20 years (2002-2022). Enlisted in logistics, selected for the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program and commissioned in 2008; served as Infantry Officer, Ground Intelligence Officer, Weapons Tactics Instructor, and Intelligence Tactics Instructor with multiple combat deployments. Company Commander at Recruit Training Battalion, Parris Island and Intelligence Department Head and Company Commander at 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines; Operations Branch Head at Training and Education Command, Quantico, 2019-2022, supporting Force Design 2030. Retired as Major (O-4).
Education
Master of Business Administration, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, 2022
Bachelor of Business, Information Systems Management, Auburn University Harbert School of Business, 2008
Core competencies
Federal capture strategy; Department of War business development; teaming agreements and prime/sub structuring; federal acquisition vehicles including OTA, MIPR, and GSA pathways; proposal compliance; rapid prototyping for government demonstrations; military intelligence and operations
Jake Castillo · Senior Director of Growth
David Jones
FEDERAL GROWTH & CAPTURE
Proposal & Capture Lead | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/david-jones-3a7341115
Proposal and capture professional with nine years running competitive response programs in government and enterprise software, including four years at OpenGov where the RFP program's contribution to company ARR rose from 1.78% to 14%. Owns solicitation intake, compliance tracking, and past performance packaging at Kaizen across federal and state pursuits.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Proposal & Capture Lead
November 2024 - Present
·
Owns federal solicitation intake and analysis, producing the deliverable, contract-instrument, and evaluation breakdown every bid decision is made from.
·
Runs compliance and submission mechanics on live solicitations across both FAR-based and OTA acquisition paths.
·
Assembles the past performance, reference, and key personnel packages Kaizen competes with.
OpenGov — RFP Program Manager
May 2019 - Apr 2023
Cloud-based software for U.S. state and local governments; advanced from Product Proposal Specialist to RFP Program Manager.
·
Built the RFP program from the ground up and increased ARR generated from RFPs by 865% over four years, raising the program's share of total company ARR from 1.78% to 14%.
·
Drove RFP win rate from 14% to 31% within twelve months and expanded RFP volume by 500%.
·
Project managed solicitations ranging from $50K to roughly $2M in total contract value, and implemented an opportunity qualification tool into the deal playbook.
·
Hired, trained, and managed a five-person team and coordinated responses across Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Professional Services, Legal, Finance, Security, and Engineering.
Trustwave — RFP Analyst
Jan 2018 - May 2019
Managed security services provider.
·
Doubled the company's RFP win rate from 6% to 15% in under a year.
·
Promoted to interim RFP team manager during the manager's leave.
Office Depot — Proposal Writer / Bid Production Specialist
Nov 2016 - Dec 2017
·
Managed bid opportunities ranging from $50K to $25M in sales as the top-ranking member of a ten-person team.
Education
B.A., English with a Writing Concentration, Wheaton College, 2016
Core competencies
RFP and RFI response management; federal solicitation analysis and compliance matrices; OTA and FAR-based acquisition research; past performance and reference packaging; key personnel volumes; incumbency and competitive research; proposal team management; Loopio, RFPio, Qvidian, Salesforce, Adobe InDesign
David Jones · Proposal & Capture Lead
Matt Abrams
FEDERAL GROWTH & CAPTURE
Proposal Writer & Capture Strategist | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/matt-abrams12
Proposal specialist with six years writing and managing competitive bids, including four at EAB producing 75+ compliant responses a year in support of $10M+ in annual partnership revenue. Drafts federal RFI and RFP content at Kaizen and prepares terms exceptions, redlines, and past performance material for state and local solicitations.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Proposal Writer & Capture Strategist
February 2026 - Present
·
Drafts Kaizen's federal RFI and RFP content, including the Department of Veterans Affairs Lifestage Benefits Optimization response and its milestone pricing structure.
·
Prepares terms exceptions and redline packages with written justification against government terms.
·
Carries state and local solicitations through submission, and built the internal tooling that shortens turnaround on quick-response bids.
EAB — Senior Proposal Specialist
Oct 2021 - Feb 2026
Education research, technology, and services firm.
·
Led proposal and content strategy supporting $10M+ in annual partnership revenue, producing 75+ compliant responses per year.
·
Built and maintained a centralized proposal content repository of reusable templates and boilerplate, cutting production time by 50%.
·
Managed up to ten concurrent RFPs and high-value proposal projects, and introduced AI-driven workflow changes that shortened submission timelines by 25%.
EAB — Senior Customer Success Associate
Dec 2020 - Oct 2021
·
Managed relationships across 50 education partners at a 92% retention rate.
·
Produced performance reports supporting renewal negotiations for contracts totaling $1M annually, and trained four new hires.
Education
B.A., Communications, University of Maryland
Core competencies
Federal RFI and RFP response writing; compliance review against PWS and solicitation requirements; terms exceptions and redline justification; proposal content library management; pricing and milestone narrative development; concurrent bid management; Salesforce and proposal management systems
Matt Abrams · Proposal Writer & Capture Strategist
Michael Atkinson
STATE & LOCAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Head of Sales | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/michaelatkinson87
Revenue leader with more than fifteen years in government technology and energy, six of them at OpenGov selling cloud ERP to cities, counties, and state agencies. Runs Kaizen's state and local go-to-market organization, sets deal qualification standards, and drives the up-market pipeline across state, county, and transit buyers.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Head of Sales
March 2026 - Present
·
Runs Kaizen's state and local go-to-market organization, setting the deal qualification standard and the forecasting discipline behind the pipeline.
·
Moved the field team up-market from small recreation deals to state and large-county pursuits, including California Government Operations Agency, LA Metro, and statewide IT procurements.
·
Builds the account and procurement strategy behind enterprise state pursuits, mapping stakeholders and contract vehicles to a pilot path.
OpenGov — Strategic Sales Director
2020 - 2026
Cloud-based ERP software for U.S. state and local governments; advanced from account executive to sales leadership over six years.
·
Led a five-person government sales team and secured a seven-figure expansion contract with the City of Boston within the first 60 days in the role.
·
Directed enterprise government sales across the Eastern U.S. with more than $8M in annual recurring revenue under management; recruited seven sales executives in 2024 and promoted three account executives to senior roles.
·
Ranked #1 account executive company-wide in 2023 at 110% to quota, and attained 150% of a $1M quota in 2021 as the top margin-generating seller; President's Club in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
·
Navigated FDNY's legal, procurement, and IT security review to displace an incumbent and expand adoption across all firehouses, and signed the District of Columbia Department of General Services to a $1M+ procurement contract.
Constellation Energy — Business Development Manager; Association Manager; Program Manager
2010 - 2020
Fortune 200 energy company providing power, gas, and renewables.
·
Signed more than 30 new commercial and industrial customers in twelve months and built $1.5M in additional pipeline through direct prospecting.
·
Grew the National Asphalt and Pavement Association account by 800%, making it one of the company's largest natural gas-consuming association relationships.
·
Hit approximately 230% of quota in year two as association manager, the highest percent-to-quota on the team, and personally closed nearly $2M within a gas channel approaching $5M in annual gross margin.
Education
Master of Business Administration, Management, Loyola University
Bachelor of Business Administration, Finance, Loyola University
Core competencies
Enterprise SaaS sales leadership; government procurement strategy; MEDDPICC deal qualification; pipeline forecasting and sales operations; complex contract negotiation; team hiring and coaching; state and local government relationships
Michael Atkinson · Head of Sales
Jeff Goldberg
STATE & LOCAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Account Executive | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/jgold01
Seven years in business-to-business software sales, most recently concentrated on public-sector buyers. Joined Kaizen in April 2024 as the founding business development hire and now carries the East territory, running full-cycle pursuits with counties, municipalities, and state park agencies. Owns contract and statement-of-work negotiation on late-stage deals plus chief-information-officer outreach into enterprise government IT.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Account Executive
April 2024 - Present
Joined as founding Business Development Representative; moved into the Account Executive seat in May 2025.
·
Carries the East territory, running full-cycle pursuits with counties, municipalities, and state park agencies.
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Owns contract and statement-of-work negotiation on late-stage deals, including the Palm Beach County recreation management pursuit through procurement.
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Runs the state enterprise motion, sourcing chief-information-officer relationships cold and demonstrating to state parks agencies across the country.
Trullion — Sr. Business Development Representative
Oct 2021 - Mar 2024
AI-based accounting and lease-accounting software company.
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Sourced new opportunities producing over $1.3M in closed-won ARR, 105% lifetime quota attainment, and $6M+ in sourced pipeline across 2.5 years.
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Built customized outreach sequences spanning cold calls, referrals, and networking events, and mentored new business development representatives on call structure and objection handling.
Panorays — Founding Business Development Representative
Oct 2019 - Sep 2021
Third-party cyber risk management platform.
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Owned all inbound leads and generated outbound pipeline producing over $1M in closed-won ARR, 95% lifetime quota attainment, and $6M+ in sourced pipeline.
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Researched accounts and wrote personalized messaging for C-level security prospects, maintaining a 300+ lead pipeline across U.S. and EMEA markets.
Education
Bachelor of Science, Finance and Banking, University of Missouri, 2018
Core competencies
State and local government sales; full-cycle enterprise sales; contract and statement-of-work negotiation; public procurement and RFP response; parks and recreation domain knowledge; cold outreach and pipeline generation; discovery and solution demonstration; conference and association business development
Jeff Goldberg · Account Executive
Megan McCaffrey
STATE & LOCAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Account Executive | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/meganemccaffrey
Account executive with three years selling SaaS into mid-market and enterprise buyers, earning President's Club at both Frontline Education and Insperity, preceded by seven years teaching and leading in public schools. Works a multi-state government territory at Kaizen spanning state parks agencies, county park systems, and transit authorities.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Account Executive
April 2026 - Present
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Works a multi-state government territory spanning state parks agencies, county park systems, and transit authorities.
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Runs discovery and demonstration on enterprise pursuits, including agency demos rebuilt on the customer's own data.
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Supports large transit and state modernization pursuits, including LA Metro and the California Government Operations Agency.
Frontline Education — Strategic Account Executive
Apr 2025 - Apr 2026
SaaS provider for K-12 school district administration.
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Exceeded quota at 104% and earned President's Club; promoted within ten months on performance and deal complexity.
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Managed a seven-state territory selling into mid-market and enterprise organizations, driving new business, cross-sell, and expansion.
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Applied MEDDPICC to qualify opportunities and forecast, and navigated multi-stakeholder deals across economic buyers, champions, and technical evaluators.
Insperity — Account Executive
Aug 2023 - Apr 2025
Professional employer organization providing HR and employment services.
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Exceeded annual quota by 120% and earned President's Club; hit Fast Start Club by surpassing 100% of quota within the first six months.
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Owned the full sales cycle from outbound prospecting through negotiation and close, building consultative relationships with C-suite and senior stakeholders.
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Developed tailored proposals focused on operational efficiency, compliance, and return on investment.
McKelvey Elementary — Elementary Educator
Aug 2016 - Aug 2023
Public elementary school in St. Louis, Missouri.
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Led a six-person team, aligning priorities, workflows, and outcomes, and managed relationships across 60+ stakeholders.
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Named Teacher of the Year for 2018-2019.
Education
Master of Science, Instructional Technology Leadership, Southwest Baptist University
Bachelor of Science, Elementary Education, University of Missouri-Columbia
Core competencies
Full-cycle SaaS sales; multi-state government territory management; MEDDPICC qualification and forecasting; discovery and demo development; multi-stakeholder public sector deals; opportunity research and briefing; Salesforce, Gong, ZoomInfo, Sales Navigator
Megan McCaffrey · Account Executive
Kevin Dennehy
FINANCE & BUSINESS OPERATIONS
Strategic Finance Lead | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/kevin-dennehy-39235614a
Five years in corporate finance across investment banking, high-growth infrastructure software, and digital identity, most recently leading companywide profit-and-loss forecasting at ID.me and previously owning a $750M+ operating budget and a $600M+ cloud hosting spend at Datadog. First dedicated finance hire at Kaizen, covering federal invoicing and milestone billing, contract pricing build-ups, monthly close, and board reporting.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Strategic Finance Lead
March 2026 - Present
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First dedicated finance hire; built and runs federal invoicing operations across the agency portfolio, including milestone billing on the National Archives, Commerce, and Education engagements.
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Authored the milestone schedule and pricing build-up behind the Department of Veterans Affairs subcontract, in both firm-fixed-price and labor-category views.
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Owns the monthly close and board reporting cycle, and manages payroll and benefits administration.
ID.me — Manager, Finance and Investor Relations
Oct 2024 - Mar 2026
Digital identity verification provider
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Led companywide P&L forecasting and budgeting, consolidating operational initiatives into a single financial forecast.
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Supported a Series E financing led by Ribbit Capital that raised over $300M, developing investor materials, coordinating with outside counsel, and responding to diligence requests.
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Built a company-wide budget-versus-actuals process from scratch, cutting operating expense variances from over 15% to under 3%.
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Owned reporting and forecasting of non-GAAP KPIs including ARR, retention, and sales efficiency, and restructured workforce reporting with HR and Accounting to improve headcount forecast accuracy.
Datadog, Inc. — Senior Analyst, FP&A
Oct 2022 - Oct 2024
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Main financial partner to the R&D and G&A organizations, building annual and quarterly operating budgets covering 3,500+ headcount and a $750M+ operating expense budget.
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Responsible for a $600M+ hosting budget across AWS, GCP, and Azure, managing the gross margin forecast alongside the FinOps organization.
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Built a product-level profitability model with Product, Engineering, and Finance that surfaced cost optimization opportunities and informed executive pricing decisions.
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Developed a recruiting-capacity-based headcount forecast methodology that held R&D headcount and compensation budget variance under 1%.
Stifel Financial Corp. — Investment Banking Analyst, Industrials
Jun 2021 - Oct 2022
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Supported sell-side M&A and capital markets transactions, drafting teasers, CIMs, and management presentations and running data rooms.
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Built three-statement operating models, DCF models, and LBO models.
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Prepared pitch books, industry research, and market updates for senior bankers.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Finance, Summa Cum Laude, Fordham University, 2021
Core competencies
Federal contract invoicing and milestone billing; government pricing build-ups and labor category rate analysis; FP&A and budget-versus-actuals; P&L forecasting and monthly close; board and investor reporting; payroll and benefits administration; three-statement, DCF, and LBO modeling; Tableau
Kevin Dennehy · Strategic Finance Lead
Benjamin Rubenstein
FINANCE & BUSINESS OPERATIONS
Senior Business Operations Manager | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/benjaminrrubenstein
Eight years in operations and go-to-market leadership at venture-backed technology companies. Scaled Snackpass from 10 to more than 40 markets as head of expansion, closing product partnerships with Google, DoorDash, Uber, and Yelp while hiring 50+ people company-wide. Handles federal business development operations at Kaizen: partner and vendor agreement negotiation, conference and press logistics, and opportunity research across civilian agencies.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Business Operations Manager
June 2026 - Present
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Handles federal business development operations: partner and vendor agreement negotiation, pipeline qualification, and conference and press operations.
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Negotiated Kaizen's government-affairs services agreement and carries partner qualification across the federal civilian portfolio, including approval as a Leidos partner supporting Social Security Administration work.
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Runs Kaizen's federal conference and media presence, from AUSA to sponsored industry roundtables.
Snackpass — Director (Head) of Expansion and Partnerships
Mar 2020 - Jun 2026
Venture-backed commerce and point-of-sale platform.
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Scaled operations from 10 to more than 40 markets across 40+ states, moving the company from a single vertical to thousands of customers and 100+ multi-location brands.
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Rebuilt go-to-market strategy and pricing into a SaaS plus transaction-fee model that doubled sales growth and made forecasting predictable; owned top- and bottom-line revenue targets during a period of 10x revenue growth.
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Sourced and closed revenue-generating partnerships in payments, hardware, and distribution with Google, Yelp, DoorDash, Uber, and Deliverect.
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Recruited and managed a 10+ person team across customer success, onboarding, partnerships, and sales enablement; hired 50+ people company-wide.
Lime — Sr. Associate, Global Brand Marketing and Partnerships
Oct 2018 - Jan 2020
Micro-mobility operator.
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Designed, closed, and implemented micro-mobility pilots with cities, counties, and universities, expanding the company's footprint in target markets.
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Ran campaigns across 10+ markets including Los Angeles, Berlin, and Paris, coordinating with 100+ local teams.
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Migrated 70+ markets onto a new event platform and launched the company-wide ambassador program.
Octagon — Business Development Trainee
Jul 2018 - Sep 2018
Sports and entertainment marketing agency.
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Evaluated, developed, and submitted consulting RFP responses valued at $3M to $10M.
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Built sponsorship strategy proposals for existing agency brands.
Education
Bachelor of Science, Sport Management, Syracuse University (David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics), cum laude
Core competencies
Federal business development operations; teaming and vendor agreement negotiation; partnership development; go-to-market and pricing strategy; conference and event operations; market expansion; press and media coordination; team building
Benjamin Rubenstein · Senior Business Operations Manager
Alyssa Placa
PEOPLE & TALENT
Recruiting Lead | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/alyssa-placa-918273111
Nine years in technical recruiting, five of them at Palantir Technologies and two at Jane Street, where 76 software engineers were hired in a single year at an 86% offer acceptance rate. Leads talent acquisition at Kaizen, owning requisitions from intake through close. Also owns the personnel-record controls that follow a signed offer: background screening, payroll and benefits enrollment, and employment-eligibility paperwork.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Recruiting Lead
January 2025 - Present
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Leads talent acquisition, owning requisitions from intake through close; announced more than 20 hires across engineering, data, design, deployment, growth, and finance in 2026.
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Ran and closed the senior and federal-facing searches, including the Chief Technology Officer, Head of Federal Growth, and Senior Security Engineer roles.
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Owns the post-offer personnel controls: background screening, payroll and benefits enrollment, employment-eligibility verification, and compliance training assignment.
Jane Street — Technical Recruiter
Nov 2022 - Sep 2024
Quantitative trading firm.
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Hired 76 software engineers in the first year and 54 in the second, holding an 86% offer acceptance rate.
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Reviewed 10,000 applicants in the first week of software engineering internship applications, with every candidate answered within 24 to 48 hours.
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Built a market-mapping strategy integrated with Greenhouse, Gem, and internal reporting tools, and closed a pipeline gap between production and software engineering roles with a team-matching process.
Palantir Technologies — Recruiting Lead (promoted from Technical Recruiter)
Jun 2019 - Oct 2022
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Co-led hiring for the Software Engineering and Forward Deployed Software Engineering verticals across US, Canada, and EMEA pipelines, working with senior leadership on talent planning.
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Hired 48 engineers in 2022 at a 73% offer acceptance rate, running 25 to 30 recruiter prescreens and 50 to 75 sourced-candidate outreaches per week.
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Rebuilt the company-wide employee referral program with cross-functional governance and guidelines, producing 89% year-over-year growth in referral hires post-IPO.
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Managed and mentored three technical recruiters and one sourcer, and built a structured internship evaluation and conversion process.
Wade & Wendy — Lead Recruiter
Oct 2018 - May 2019
AI recruiting startup, later acquired by PandoLogic.
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Scaled the company from 13 to 27 employees in 10 weeks, hiring across senior software engineering, software architecture, QA, NLP data science, product management, UX/UI, and enterprise sales.
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Sourced AI talent without premium tooling by working GitHub, technical communities, and niche referral networks.
Green Key Resources — Technical Recruiter
Mar 2017 - Oct 2018
Staffing and recruiting agency.
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Ran full-cycle recruitment for law firm, financial services, technology startup, and advertising clients, placing candidates from entry level through executive.
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Negotiated offers, compensation packages, and titles across data engineering, IT leadership, business analysis, and technical program management searches.
Education
BA in Psychology, State University of New York at New Paltz, 2016
Core competencies
Full-cycle technical recruiting; executive search; sourcing strategy and market mapping; Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever, and Gem administration; offer negotiation and compensation benchmarking; referral program design; hiring manager enablement; personnel records and pre-employment screening
Alyssa Placa · Recruiting Lead
Luis Avila
PEOPLE & TALENT
Senior Recruiter | Kaizen · Veteran
linkedin.com/in/luisavila21
Six years in technical recruiting, preceded by five in U.S. Army human capital operations. Built infrastructure, supply chain, and data teams from zero at Embark as it grew from roughly 100 to 350 people through Series C, IPO, and acquisition, and drove more than 60% of hires at RevolutionParts. Covers engineering, security, design, and deployment searches at Kaizen, screening candidates on federal compliance depth.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Senior Recruiter
May 2026 - Present
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Covers engineering, security, design, and deployment searches, screening candidates on federal compliance depth.
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Closed the 2026 engineering class, including senior hires out of Microsoft Azure and out of federal design-system work at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
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Owns the Senior Security Engineer search and runs the designer and deployment strategist pipelines alongside hiring managers.
Axon — Technical Recruiter
Feb 2025 - May 2026
NASDAQ: AXON. Public safety technology.
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Scaled internship hiring by 42 hires year over year, a 110% increase, delivering more than double the prior output with reduced recruiter support.
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Owned recruiting for hardware, software, and AI-adjacent roles, including hiring across post-acquisition Dedrone counter-drone teams during a rapid ramp.
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Rebuilt internship and junior software engineering hiring from scratch, adding Codility and AI-based screening.
RevolutionParts — Technical Recruiter (promoted from first Technical Sourcer)
Jun 2023 - Dec 2024
Series A e-commerce platform for automotive parts.
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Drove more than 60% of company hires, building pipelines of roughly 500 candidates per month and cutting time-to-hire to 32.6 days against a 39.8-day team average.
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Raised 12-month retention to 87.5% and candidate satisfaction from 3.9 to 4.7 out of 5; increased workforce diversity from 38% to 41%.
Embark Trucks — Technical Recruiter (promoted from first Technical Sourcer)
Jun 2021 - Jun 2023
NASDAQ: EMBK. Autonomous trucking company, later acquired by Applied Intuition.
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Helped scale the company from roughly 100 to 350 employees through Series C, IPO, and acquisition.
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Built global supply chain, DevOps, and data infrastructure teams from zero.
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Recruited across the autonomy stack (perception, planning and controls, machine learning) with the CTO and Head of Perception, sourcing through GitHub, research publications, and technical communities.
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Drove roughly 90% of hires from sourced candidates at approximately 500 candidates sourced per month.
Amazon — Recruiting and People Operations
Nov 2020 - Jun 2021
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Supported staffing and HR operations for a 9,000+ employee region across multiple sites, aligning hiring to compliance standards.
Military service
United States Army, 5 years (June 2015 - April 2020), People Operations / human capital planning. Supported human capital planning for U.S.-Republic of Korea joint military operations, including force readiness and mission-critical personnel deployment, and led a five-person team running HR operations for one of the Army's largest military intelligence units.
Education
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
SHRM Veterans at Work Certificate Program
Code Platoon, Introduction to Coding (Python)
Core competencies
Technical and executive sourcing; engineering, security, and infrastructure recruiting; federal and cleared-adjacent talent screening; Ashby and Codility administration; pipeline analytics and time-to-hire reduction; university and internship program design; military human capital operations
Luis Avila · Senior Recruiter
Mashhood Salahuddin
PEOPLE & TALENT
Executive Assistant/Office Manager | Kaizen
linkedin.com/in/mashhood-salahuddin-3b57a22b1
More than a decade supporting founders and C-suite leaders, most recently at Tomorrow Health, Gradient Technologies, and BlueVoyant, spanning calendar and travel management, investor materials, and board communications. Handles device procurement, software provisioning, and access revocation for every Kaizen hire and departure, administers the E-Verify system of record, and runs office operations in New York and Washington, DC.
Relevant experience
Kaizen — Executive Assistant/Office Manager
September 2025 - Present
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Owns device procurement, account provisioning, and access revocation for every Kaizen hire and departure, and rebuilt the offboarding controls behind it.
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Administers the company's employment-eligibility verification as a named E-Verify administrator.
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Runs office operations in New York and Washington, DC, and coordinates board meeting logistics.
Tomorrow Health — Executive Assistant to the CEO
Mar 2024 - Apr 2025
Home-based healthcare technology company.
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Managed the CEO's calendar, inbox, and complex domestic travel, drafting and replying on the CEO's behalf.
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Ran company all-hands, owning agendas and minutes for internal and external meetings, and sat in on investor and customer meetings.
Gradient Technologies — Chief of Staff
May 2022 - Jan 2024
Cybersecurity startup.
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Drafted sensitive investor and board communications and built investor decks used in funding pitches; supported a $10M bridge financing.
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Led and implemented corporate strategy initiatives, set agendas for all-hands and leadership meetings, and traveled with the CEO for business across Boston, New York, and San Francisco.
BlueVoyant — Executive Business Partner to the CEO / Business Operations Manager / Investor Relations
May 2020 - May 2022
Cybersecurity services company.
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Built investor decks for Series B and Series C funding rounds and maintained the investor, capital-commitment, and capital-movement tracking model across all funds.
WisdomTree Asset Management — Executive Administrative Coordinator to the COO/EVP and CLO
Nov 2019 - Feb 2020
Exchange-traded fund sponsor and asset manager.
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Arranged travel and gathered required compliance documentation for executive trips.
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Acquired and stood up a contract management system for the team, raising throughput by a reported 70%.
The Ohio State University — Ischemic Spinal Cord Injury Lab / Self-Intubation Robot Lab — Executive Assistant / Research and Outreach Coordinator
Mar 2010 - Jul 2019
Academic medical research laboratories.
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Ran outreach to DARPA, medical institutions, and private investors to secure research funding and partnerships.
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Reviewed and helped execute deal documents for NIH and other grant acquisitions.
Education
History and Pre-Medicine coursework, The Ohio State University, 2010-2015
Core competencies
Executive support to founders and C-suite; IT asset procurement and device lifecycle management; account provisioning and access revocation; Apple MDM and Vanta device enrollment; I-9 and E-Verify administration; board and investor meeting coordination; multi-site office operations; expense and vendor administration
Mashhood Salahuddin · Executive Assistant/Office Manager