Prologue: The Agency Years
Five and a half years at Delphic Digital, Sr. Front End → Lead → Director, and the patterns that came out of that work and became the way I architect platforms today.
Twelve years, condensed. A prologue from the agency era at Delphic, then nine years at Vanguard FAS. The thread: introduce the right thing at the right time, protect the system around it, and let the compounding do the work. Each chapter is a real piece of platform work that made the next chapter possible.
A prologue + six numbered chapters, the platform story start to finish.
Five and a half years at Delphic Digital, Sr. Front End → Lead → Director, and the patterns that came out of that work and became the way I architect platforms today.
Introducing Vue.js to Vanguard FAS at a time when the division was constrained to legacy frameworks, and embedding it into the platform without fragmenting ownership.
Turning a fragmented front-end into a unified, framework-agnostic design system that powers advisors.vanguard.com and ~50 advisor tools.
Designing AXS as a framework-agnostic system so it could support Angular, Vue, and AEM simultaneously, and outlast whatever framework comes next.
Deploying AXS components into Adobe Experience Manager so marketers and content creators could ship on-brand experiences without engineering bottlenecks.
Holding the line on ownership, boundaries, and architectural direction as adoption grew, the discipline that lets a design system actually last.
Leading Vanguard's AI-driven portfolio analysis product from architecture through pilot to launch, reaching 110,000 advisors on day one.
Companion pieces. One on the AXS × AI architecture; one on how I lead engineers and set technical standards.
How the AXS design system was extended into an AI-ready platform, IDE metadata at build time, an MCP server with 9 tools, and agentic workflows that enforce architecture from inside the IDE.
How I work with my team, the way I think about mentoring, the way I think about contributing code, and why those are the same engineering instincts at different scales.