Two crafts
My first career is twenty years of client-facing video production: freelance writer, producer, director, and editor in Los Angeles and Seattle from 2006, including my own corporate video company, Solid State Media; Lead Video Producer and Creative Program Manager at The Garrigan Lyman Group from 2013 to 2018; and Sr. Video Producer / Instructional Designer at T-Mobile since 2018, where I built the business division's video studio from scratch and am the one-man-band producer for a 3,500+ person national sales organization. From 2023 to 2025 I also ran a part-time production company of my own, Roundabout Creative.
In 2024 I started bringing AI tools into that pipeline for writing, storyboarding, concepting, and editing. By 2025 I was designing and shipping the team's production LLM systems inside enterprise IT constraints, in a stretch assignment as AI Tooling & Process Engineer. I've trained two video producers and an intern, and now mentor three junior producers.
Outside T-Mobile, through my own company, Swapzy Enterprises, I've built and run a portfolio of production AWS applications solo since 2025: architecture, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and the product. Each case study on this site shows a different Forward Deployed Engineer competency, from real-time voice AI and Neon-native architecture with row-level-security authorization to agentic AI running in production across the portfolio.
The first craft
Twenty years of it looks like this.
The case
Why the dual identity is the qualification
Twenty years of client-facing production is daily practice in turning a technical or creative problem into something an executive, client, or field rep can act on, in plain language, on deadline. Building AWS applications alone is the same translation from the engineering side, with no team to hand the hard part to.
"I already sit between a hard problem and a real user."
That's the Forward Deployed Engineer case. The work, the resume, and this page each make it.