Selected work · 03
Growing BitGo’s blockchain organization alongside the business
I joined BitGo with no previous crypto experience and chose the blockchain team because it was the most technically demanding. I earned credibility by learning the domain from first principles. As the business grew and my manager left, leadership became the work the organization needed from me.
Institutional custody · Blockchain platform & organization
Visit BitGoMy role
Started as a senior blockchain engineer with no prior crypto experience, then grew into engineering leadership while remaining deeply involved in technical direction, hiring, and organization design.
The work
What changed, and why.
- Problem
- Rapid growth across customers, blockchains, and products meant a single blockchain team could no longer support the pace of the business.
- Constraints
- Every new chain and product increased operational complexity. Growth could never compromise the reliability and security of institutional custody or the customer assets it protected.
- Approach
- I built credibility through hands on execution. When my manager left, I stepped up: creating specialized teams and ownership boundaries, hiring engineering managers and senior technical leaders, and using a contractor partner as a bridge while permanent recruiting caught up. That bench grew from roughly four people to roughly 50 across the company before full time teams took ownership.
- Result
- I helped scale blockchain engineering from roughly 5 to 50+ engineers across seven specialized teams. During that period, BitGo reported more than $64B in assets under custody. That figure provides company context for the platform and is not a personally attributable outcome.
- Lesson
- Organizations should evolve only when the business demands it.
Company context source: BitGo assets under custody announcement
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