How I work

I lead small engineering teams. I hire for talent over experience, I work with stakeholders to cut every ask down to its minimum valuable version, and I coach engineers toward the point where they no longer need me in their pull requests.

At Studylog Systems and at Delphos Labs I managed a team of three: hiring, performance reviews, and roadmap and stakeholder negotiation. At Studylog I led the rewrite of a flagship Windows product as a cloud-native web platform, through a rigorous third-party security audit and the company's first SOC 2, and coding errors fell by more than half in a year.

Before that I spent a decade building, at Lookout, Synack, and my own startup, so I know the work from the inside. If you want to know how I think about leading, read how I lead.

Most recently I was a founding engineer at DesignForge AI, applying LLM agents to electromagnetic simulation, until the company shut down in October 2026. Now I'm looking for my next team to lead.

What I've led

Studylog — cloud-native rewrite As Director of Engineering, led the rewrite of a flagship Windows product as a cloud-native web platform for pharma research, through a third-party security audit and the company's first SOC 2. Managed a team of three. Coding errors fell more than 50% in a year.
Delphos Labs — AI binary analysis First engineer at a VC- and In-Q-Tel-backed startup. Led the build of the platform, the distributed pipeline (Celery + RabbitMQ), and the React/Remix product with real-time dashboards for AI-automated reverse engineering. Managed a team of three.
Where the technical credibility comes from Before management: lead frontend engineer at Lookout (malware-research tooling that doubled the team's productivity), lead engineer at Synack (UI rebuilds that lifted engagement more than 60%), and CTO of my own startup, Ultimatum. Author of the open-source OraculumJS and FactoryJS. See all my work →

What people I've worked with say

"He goes above and beyond to break down complex concepts… while allowing you the autonomy to learn from your failures, creating a culture of intellectual vulnerability. Steve doesn't settle for mediocre code; he consistently delivers beautiful, clear, best-practice code."

— Christina Wright, who reported to Steve at Studylog

"Steve architected and developed a cloud-native platform… passing a rigorous third-party security audit and achieving the company's first SOC 2. He also recruited and mentored a talented team."

— Brad Nemer, who managed Steve at Studylog

"Steve's patience, clarity and thoughtfulness are exactly the qualities you'd look for in a staff full-stack engineer if not a CTO. Steve is a joy to work with."

— Faye Salwin, Platform Engineer at Delphos Labs

"Steve still represents the high-water mark for me in terms of sheer front-end engineering talent… equally passionate about doing things the right way, at a high level of quality."

— Derek Halliday, Chief Product Officer at Benchling

Let's talk

I'm looking for engineering manager roles at startups and growth-stage companies with product engineering teams: a small team, real users, and problems worth the care. If that's you, I'd love to talk.

Email me Read my résumé