Zander
Indo
Making it exist is the reward. It always has been.
Engineering manager, 18 years in — and I never put the code down. These days that means working out how a whole team builds differently with AI.
More than the title
I've never really fit one title. Every job I've had, I ended up doing more than the title said — picking up product work, roadmapping, whatever the team needed — and I never put the craft down to do it.
Here's the honest version: I don't need to write every line of code myself to feel like I built something. Making it exist is the reward. It always has been. So when people started calling AI the end of this kind of work, I understood the fear — I felt the pull of it myself. But I came out the other side somewhere else:
A tool that makes it easier to build was never going to be the thing that ends me.
That's where most of my energy goes now — not just using it, but working out how a whole team works differently because of it.
02 Selected Work
A slice of shippable work — much of the rest is under NDA.
omniService
Product architecture firm I co-founded and run — brand, site and systems, end to end. Co-founder · Live site
Service Center
→Replaced hand-built collections portfolios with a data-driven task queue — 12,000+ tasks a day. Case study · Prestige
Bose QuietComfort
Interactive product page I built — scroll-driven animation and product storytelling. Live demo · Front-end
03 How I operate
Lead without putting the craft down
I manage the team and still write the code; hiring, org design, and predictable delivery don't mean I stop building.
Direct the AI, keep the judgment
I build with AI every day, but I'm still the one deciding what's actually right.
Own the problem, not just the ticket
I take an ambiguous problem and stay on it through product, design, and front-end until something real ships.
Grow the people around me
I bring engineers and design-minded builders up a level, because the team outlasts anything I'd ship alone.
04 Experience
Software Engineering Manager · Prestige Financial Services
Lead the software engineering and UX teams and stood up the org's first UX practice. Own delivery process across Product, Engineering, QA, and UX — staffing, coaching, priorities, and quality standards.
Frontend Tech Lead · Bose Professional
Led frontend architecture, prototyping, and stakeholder scoping for the Videobar line — and owned the CI/CD pipeline, merge rules, build nodes, and release process.
Tech Lead → Sr. UI Developer · MRM // McCann
Ran daily scrum, scoped and forecast work across multiple teams and clients, and drove architectural decisions for national brand builds.
Software Engineer · Axis41, A Merkle Company
Principal front-end developer on the Sitecore team — rebuilt Dignity Health's responsive corporate site and built the Mini USA vehicle configurator.
Owner · Z Industries Online
Independent consulting practice — UX, front-end engineering, and architecture for a range of web and application clients, end to end.
Atlas
When I started building with AI agents, I didn't just want faster output — I wanted to understand why it worked, well enough to teach it. So I built the whole system in the open: instructions, agents, skills, hooks — documented as I went. Atlas is that record — ten lessons, free, from first install to a team of specialized agents working together. It's what "building differently with AI" looks like when you take it all the way.
Red Gobbo, now with lights
I was inspired by Chris Buxey. He built this incredible thing that I fell in love with, but the light strands just sat there, static. I wanted to see if I could push the limits a little further with AI.
ESP32-C3 · ULN2803 sink driver · 6 strand LEDs on software PWM, plus FIRE and FUSE effect LEDs · three modes, 800ms fades · PlatformIO/C++
05 Toolkit
Leadership
AI & Agents
Craft
Let's talk about
what's next.
Email me →
Looking for someone who leads without putting the craft down? That's the whole idea.