The story
From a Fortune 50 desk to being the person on the hook.
Why the job was left, what the leaving was built to test, and what the test turned into. In his words.
Before Freddie Mac I had two very different jobs: data research analyst at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, a policy think tank, and Java backend intern at a software consultancy, writing Spring Boot microservices. The data work and the backend work on this site's register both started there.
Right out of UC Irvine, I joined Freddie Mac as a financial modeling development engineer. It was a six-figure, Fortune 50 job with stability, strong benefits, and a clear career path: the kind of role many computer-science graduates spend college working toward.
I left in the summer of 2023, after about a year, and I left deliberately. The job was good; it was also one kind of problem, and I was answerable for the code rather than for what the code did for the business. I wanted the other side of that line: systems where I was responsible for the commercial outcome, across more than one kind of problem. I have a low tolerance for risk and mistakes, so the exit was built the way I build anything else, as the smallest thing that would test the idea.
The test was paid work. The first contract came through Upwork in August 2023, weeks after I left: a batch product scraper for an ecommerce marketplace, delivered as CSV with an explicit success, partial, or failure result for every item. Upwork now lists eleven contracts, seven fixed-price and four hourly, for clients in the US, Turkey, and elsewhere; the longest is a two-year hourly retainer, and the profile is Top Rated. Several of those contracts are on the register, with the clients unnamed.
The question I left to work on has not changed: how do you determine what people want, and how quickly can you validate it? The answer became Qelv, a technical delivery company working across software, data, automation, growth, and engineering capacity. Since the summer of 2023 we have completed more than forty client engagements, from discovery and scoping through demos, prototypes, and full builds.
Writing the code is often the easiest part.
What I have learned since is that the work around the code decides whether a project pays off. Sometimes that means advising a client against building what they originally asked for, when the expected value does not justify the cost.