My career started in 2015 when I joined Shopify, after catching their attention through McHacks, Canada's biggest student hackathon at the time, which was run by HackMcGill a student club that I co-founded while studying computer science at McGill.

I joined the team during what I still consider the company's golden era, surrounded by deeply talented engineers (David Cornu, Simon Eskildsen, Kir Shatrov, Jean Boussier, to name only a few), and grew quickly within the Production Engineering team.

Within a few years, I became one of the main committers to the Shopify monolith, one of the largest Ruby on Rails applications in the world. I worked directly on core scalability initiatives: zero-downtime migrations of MySQL database shards, and a rebuild of Shopify’s background job infrastructure on top of Redis to enable horizontal scaling across an arbitrary number of instances. That period shaped how I think about large systems, operational safety, and long-term technical decision-making.

When I wasn't shipping code, I was making music. I spent thousands of hours producing, studying music production and digital audio through online courses, and embedding myself in Montreal’s beatmaking community. I began collaborating with artists online, selling beats through platforms like BeatStars, and eventually produced an official remix for Kallitechnis.

In 2020, after five years at Shopify, I decided to step away from full-time industry work to focus entirely on this pursuit. I had finished undergrad early, at 21, and felt I owed it to myself to explore something that fascinated me and see how far I could take it.

That time was creatively fruitful. I released an EP, made hundreds of tracks (most of which remain unreleased) and immersed myself in the creative process. Along the way, my curiosity shifted toward the tools themselves. I started asking how plugins were made, which led me to learn C++ and JUCE, and into the unfamiliar and intimidating territory of systems programming. For the first time, I found a passion strong enough to pull me there on its own.

At the same time, I became disillusioned with the business side of music. With limited entrepreneurial experience as an artist, but a strong technical skill set, it became clear that my leverage would be higher approaching the space as a technologist rather than solely as a creator. Without a clear direction, I decided it was safer to return to full-time industry work.

That next chapter took me to Stripe, where I joined the Ruby Services team in 2021. There, I applied my experience from large Ruby codebases to build tooling and steward best practices for internal teams working on Ruby applications.

I learned a great deal and shipped meaningful work, but my previous chapter as a music producer had changed me. I was no longer satisfied being a small part of a massive machine, and the desire to build something more personal and entrepreneurial was still there. In the background, I was already beta-testing plugin ideas with a growing group of music producers and enthusiasts.

Before acting on that pull, another opportunity came to me. A recruiter reached out about interviewing with hedge funds in London. I ended up doing so with Citadel (it was very intense), and then joined their Reference Data team as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer. It was an experience! On-call rotations were often brutal, there were many late nights, I routinely worked on weekends, and there was an overall intensity (some good, some bad) that came with working at one the world’s most successful hedge funds. But through that, I developed a level of stamina and resourcefulness I’m deeply grateful for. Living in the UK also marked a period of significant personal growth (and it's also where my daughter was born!)

Ultimately, the call to strike out on my own didn’t fade. By then, I had built strong connections within the indie audio plugin community, through attending Audio Developer Conference in London and spending time with talented developers (like the great Sudara Williams and August Pemberton), and the team behind JUCE. That momentum finally led to the creation of time off audio.

Today, I split my time between growing time off audio and working as an independent software contractor, helping clients build new web products or evolve existing ones. At time off audio, I do everything end-to-end: audio plugin development in C++ and JUCE, UI work in React, the website, and the business itself. It’s the first time all of my interests, including systems, music, software, and craft, have fully converged.