Protocols and philosophies that hold across scales — from org design to agentic infrastructure.

The discipline is the same whether you're designing a 300-person organization or a control plane: name what you actually depend on, admit what doesn't reduce, and build protocols that work on the substrate you have rather than the one the deck wishes you had.

I lead Delivery Engineering for a ~$480M professional services line at Cisco — 300+ people across the Americas Public Sector, building secure, AI-enabled delivery at scale. Regional role lead for NetDevOps adoption and AI in delivery. 23 years at Cisco, from TAC engineer to senior executive. Earlier: 20 years of USAF operational leadership. Provisional patents in AI memory architecture.

I still build. Python, FastAPI, distributed systems, a home lab cluster, a few apps in production. Leaders transforming technology should be able to read what they're transforming.

Currently writing publicly on agentic infrastructure, control-plane substrate, and the systems-thinking discipline underneath both. People first, always. High standards and psychological safety aren't a tradeoff — they're the same operating system.

Reach me at john@loadbearing.work if you're working on something serious in agentic infrastructure, executive roles in AI-adjacent platforms, or unexpected variations on either.