PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Entrepreneurial & Advisory

Founder & Chief Executive Officer August 2026 – Present
GOVERNBOX.ai — a Gradient Descent LLC venture | Virginia; Washington, DC Metro Area | GOVERNBOX.ai

  • Founded a self-service AI-governance SaaS (“governance in a box”) that lets nonprofits, associations, public-sector bodies, and small-to-mid-sized businesses stand up and operate a defensible AI governance program — without hiring consultants or buying an enterprise platform
  • Product spans five integrated modules — AI governance, risk, IT, data, and privacy — with sector-aware policy generation, staff training and sign-off workflows, and board-ready reporting

Founder & Principal Researcher November 2025 – Present
Gradient Descent LLC | Virginia; Washington, DC Metro Area | gradientdescent.biz

  • Virginia limited liability company (Entity ID 11924042), organized November 2025; operations began 2026
  • Direct the venture strategy of an AI think tank, venture studio, and holding company: applied AI research and IP incubation (Gradient Descent Labs), executive advisory (Gradient Descent Advisory Services · GOVERNBOX.ai Advisory Services), and enterprise software (GOVERNBOX & GOVERNBOX.ai)
  • Advise boards, executives, and technology organizations on agentic AI, responsible AI governance, enterprise technology risk, and applied ML for enterprise and public-sector environments
  • Forbes Technology Council contributor; published thought leadership on AI governance, agentic systems, and federal AI strategy

Federal Executive Leadership

Chief Information Officer / Chief AI Officer / Chief Privacy Officer (SES) July 2020 – August 2026
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) | Washington, DC

  • Led the Office of Information Technology Management: cybersecurity, application development, AI, data governance, enterprise architecture, infrastructure, IT support, privacy, and COOP
  • Advanced cybersecurity posture from “Ad Hoc” to “Managed & Measurable”; implemented SOC and Zero Trust architecture (Okta, Intune, Zscaler)
  • Designed agentic AI framework with RAG + LLM fine-tuning for financial decision-support; first of kind at a federal cultural agency
  • Designed semantic search with vector embeddings across NEA’s grants management systems
  • Led multi-cloud migration across Azure and AWS; implemented Microsoft Copilot, DocuSign, and Xacta
  • Chaired NEA AI & Data Governance Boards; authored NEA IRM Strategic Plans FY22 and FY26
  • Member, Federal Chief AI Officer (CAIO) Council — interagency body coordinating federal AI strategy, policy, and governance across the executive branch
  • Member, Federal Chief Information Officer Council (ex officio, NEA CIO)
  • Introduced vibe coding and AI-assisted rapid prototyping practices to federal development teams

CIO & Chief Digital Officer (SES) January 2017 – July 2020
Voice of America (VOA) | USAGM | Washington, DC

  • Managed 250+ staff and $200M+ technology budget serving 275M+ weekly viewers across 47 languages globally
  • Built “Ipsum,” VOA’s internal NLP auto-transcription/translation tool, achieving 10x speed improvement; adopted by 4 global media organizations
  • Launched VOA+ OTT streaming platform; deployed 20+ language-specific mobile apps with circumvention technology
  • Implemented AI recommendation engine in CMS; migrated 400+ TB to cloud enterprise Data Lake
  • Established and led USAGM CIO Council overseeing technology for 5 international broadcasting organizations; deployed camera robotics, drone program, 360° immersive news, and Alexa Skills for 12 language streams

Chief Technology Officer (GS-15) October 2015 – January 2017
USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) | Washington, DC

  • Led $100M+ technology modernization program; introduced Agile/DevOps across FSIS engineering organization
  • Re-engineered Whole Genome Sequencing infrastructure via cloud shared service with FDA & CDC: $12M/yr in cost savings
  • Created and co-chaired the USDA Chief Technology Officer Council, coordinating technology strategy across the department’s 18 agencies and 105,000 employees, against a departmental IT portfolio then exceeding $3B annually
  • Served as CTO of an agency with roughly $1B in annual budget

Chief of Digital Innovation & Development (GS-15) April 2013 – October 2015
DHS U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) | Washington, DC

  • Led first federal agency hackathon; built digital innovation program and implemented DevOps creating cross-functional development teams
  • Moved USCIS from traditional data centers to the AWS cloud
  • Introduced human-centered design and agile product development to a 20,000-person federal agency
  • Brought development cycle time down from years to months for new development, and from months to minutes for operations and maintenance

Earlier Federal Service

Business Analyst August 2011 – April 2013
U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) | Washington, DC

  • Led globally dispersed IT teams, contractors, and process owners to deliver mission-critical business applications — principally on the Salesforce platform — for 12,000+ CRM users
  • Created and maintained the Salesforce roadmap driving enterprise-wide adoption; application usage up 116% in FY12
  • Built and deployed the Marketing Information Management System for GSA’s National Marketing and Communications Division, and led the executive working group that redesigned the agency’s lead management process
  • Oversaw integration into the Salesforce enterprise environment supporting a $40B sales pipeline