Baton Rouge. El Salvador, where we lived through the escalation of the civil war. Mexico City. Veracruz. Then Wellington, Florida at ten years old. Four countries, two languages, constant adaptation — that shaped everything about how the world looks from here.
Five generations in sugar. That lineage isn't a footnote — it's the foundation this career was built on.
Today the work is building the data systems that run those operations at scale. For over five years, designing and maintaining the real-time analytics platform behind the largest cane sugar producer in the United States — currently serving the largest mill in the operation, with an architecture designed to scale across additional facilities including a second mill, refinery, and cogeneration.
The path here was not linear. A decade in international film production — co-founded a production company in Miami, directed music videos, coordinated press at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals for Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA award-winning producers and directors including Jeremy Thomas, Jerzy Skolimowski, Tom Tykwer, Danis Tanović, and Takashi Miike, and apprenticed at RE:VOIR in Paris under Pip Chodorov (close collaborator of Jonas Mekas), contributing to productions including the documentary series Cinéma, de notre temps and placing experimental cinema in the Pompidou Center, Palais de Tokyo, and MoMA. A People's Choice Award at the Px3 Prix de la Photographie in Paris.
In Antwerp — lived and worked. Diamond Grader certification from HRD. Belpearl. That led to international diamond trade across Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing — twice-annual routes over three years. From the grading lab to cross-border commerce in some of the most opaque markets on earth.
Between film and data, an independent creative practice — advertising, marketing, product photography, content production. Every role, every project, every client was a lesson in the same thing: how to take complex information and turn it into something that drives a decision.
That's the thread. Film taught narrative. Diamonds taught precision. Advertising taught audience. Data engineering is where all of it converges.
In 2019, BloomTech (formerly Lambda School) — a coding bootcamp focused on data science and computer science. 24 sprints across data science, computer science, and engineering. Predictive modeling, NLP, algorithms, SQL. Passed technical interviews. Completed a labs apprenticeship. That was the bridge.
In 2021, Florida Crystals. Within months, building the systems that would modernize infrastructure that hadn't been touched in over three decades. Led the integration of historian and process control data into a unified architecture, coordinating engineers and solution architects. Built the analytical layer — views, three-year baselines, five-year historical tables, and engineered KPIs and OKRs that now drive shift-level and executive decision-making.
Custom Power BI applications — not drag-and-drop dashboards. Hand-coded SVG visualizations, HTML/CSS/JS components, Deneb/Vega-Lite declarative grammar. 27+ live indicators across 7 process groups. Trilingual interfaces for the operators and supervisors who actually run the floor.
Novus Index — a technology research and applied AI laboratory. Private AI research laboratory building THREN Modulus, Zinnuh, and ZEIT System on private on-premise infrastructure.
Also completing a Bachelor of Business Administration through the University of the People — fitting the last formal credential into a career that has never waited for permission to move forward.
The problems that matter are where data meets the physical world — where a pipeline isn't abstract, it's connected to a mill floor, a harvest schedule, a shift supervisor making real-time decisions. The work sits at the intersection of industrial operations and modern data infrastructure, backed by something rare: generational domain expertise combined with the ability to engineer production-grade applications from scratch.
If that intersection is interesting to you, the conversation would be welcome.