About me

I’m Andrew, and I’ve always been an engineer at heart. I have a background in chemistry, but software became my career. I’m a Senior Staff Engineer at Coupang, and before that I spent nearly a decade at Amazon and AWS building large-scale data systems. I helped make EMR one of the fastest Spark distributions and designed the data platforms behind Amazon’s financial reporting. More recently, I led the architecture for AI-powered finance automation. Outside of work, I like trying odd ideas, like letting a language model put its own randomness into how it thinks.

On the creative side, I play piano, guitar, and drums, and I’m getting into electronic music production. I’m also working on a large burnable temple for Burning Man. I love Pacific Northwest nature and good mezcal and whisky, and I’ve been exploring whether camas, a native PNW plant, could become a spirit of its own.

Alongside engineering, I’m a real estate investor and short-term rental operator based in the Seattle area. In addition to my own portfolio, I co-run a vacation rental management company with my business partner, Zhilmil. We handle properties for owners across the region, from modern city townhomes to quieter retreats. Much of that work happens in spreadsheets: financial modeling, tax strategy, and finding deals where the numbers work.

This blog is where I’ll share what I’m building, learning, and wondering about.