AI Capital Allocation: What Great CTOs Stop Funding First
Strong AI strategy starts with a kill list. If a project cannot defend margin, risk, or speed, it should not survive the next budget meeting.
Law Zava
Systems Engineering and Technical Leadership
I engineer reliable infrastructure, reduce platform cost at scale, and lead technical teams to outship their peers.
What I Focus On
Systems Performance
Binary size, tail latency, memory predictability. When the runtime is the bottleneck, I reach for Rust, Zig, or C++ — not as a default, but when the numbers justify it.
Distributed State
ScyllaDB, Cassandra, and the operational reality of global state. Failure semantics, consistency trade-offs, and making distributed databases behave predictably under real load.
Engineering Operations
Small teams outperforming large ones. Clear intent, fast feedback loops, and async-first coordination over meetings and headcount.
Privacy and Compliance
Data residency, zero-trust architecture, and AI systems that satisfy regulators without crippling the product. Designed in from the start, not bolted on.
What I Believe
Reliability and cost discipline aren't at odds — they're the same engineering problem. Teams that understand their hardware, shrink their runtime dependencies, and make failure modes explicit end up with systems that are both cheaper and more reliable.
The best engineering organizations run on clear intent and fast feedback, not process overhead. I've seen five people with the right operating model outship fifty without one.
Latest Writing
AI Strategy: The CTO Perspective (It's Just Data Infrastructure)
A CTO's AI strategy in mid-2026 is brutally simple: It is not about chasing models. It is about building resilient data infrastructure, setting operational boundaries, and measuring throughput.
Sovereign Systems: Building for a World Where Data Privacy Is Non-Optional
Privacy is an architecture constraint, not a feature toggle. Teams that build sovereignty into their systems early avoid painful retrofits and close enterprise deals faster.