Merus, Inc.

As Chief Technology Officer at Merus, I was the company’s first CTO, taking on the responsibility of separating the engineering function from the CEO who had founded the company and built the first version of the product. I led engineering strategy and technical direction for a legal practice management platform that enabled law firms to manage their entire business in one place, from clients and filings to time tracking, billing, and document management.

The platform allowed lawyers to manage document templates and merge data for court filings, and we built rich text search across all legal documents using Elasticsearch. We served firms in workers compensation, personal injury, and other practice areas. In the later part of my tenure, I worked closely with customers and partners in the immigration law space to add that as an area of law we could support, learning from them and translating their needs into feature requirements.

Working with a small engineering team at a company of around 20 people, one of our biggest challenges was convincing a well-established industry to move to an up-and-coming SaaS solution and break away from traditional practices. I hired and trained engineering talent while also staying hands-on with the core architecture, balancing leadership with direct technical contribution.