Hi, I'm Joe.

I'm a hands-on engineering leader with ~20 years of experience defining and building new ways for people to interact with computers and with each other.

Shipped at scaleFaceTime on Vision Pro, Spatial Personas, Spatial SharePlay, Nearby Sharing, and the iPhone X home gesture.

San Francisco, CA

Experience

Apple, Inc

2016—Present

Senior Engineering Manager, VPG

2025—Present
  • Lead the organization responsible for real-time collaboration and communication across Apple's vision products, including FaceTime, SharePlay, and Nearby Sharing on visionOS.
  • Drove the vision and experience definition of Nearby Sharing as engineering DRI, aligning 30+ teams company-wide behind a flagship visionOS 26 feature that lets co-located Vision Pros share spatially anchored windows and apps.

Engineering Manager, VPG

2021—2025
  • Led the engineering teams that shipped FaceTime and Spatial Personas on Vision Pro.
  • Scaled the team, running over 150 technical interviews and hiring over a dozen team members.

Senior Software Engineer, VPG

2018—2021
  • Led bring-up of several visionOS apps and experiences, including Messages, Contacts, and FaceTime.
  • Wrote and demoed the first prototype of what eventually became SharePlay, Apple's real-time collaboration framework.

Senior Software Engineer, UIKit

2016—2018
  • Shipped the fluid animation system behind iPhone X's Home Gesture (the interaction that replaced the physical home button). This was UIKit's first in-process animation system used to drive several hundred concurrent animations through a continuous gesture, and is still in use today.
  • Re-architected the concurrency and locking model late in development to ship with zero dropped frames. Co-inventor on the resulting patent.
  • Modernized UIKit's animation APIs by driving deprecation of the first-generation APIs, making corner radius animatable, and adding pause/scrub to UIViewPropertyAnimator for interactive, interruptible animations.
  • Solo presenter at WWDC 2017 “Advanced Animations with UIKit”.

HeyNow, Inc

2014—2016

Cofounder, CEO

2014—2016
  • Cofounded and ran HeyNow, an art-and-research app studio that designed and shipped a series of experimental apps culminating in “HeyNow”, an iOS messaging app for sharing music, photos, and links with close friends, and reliving the highlights together.
  • Owned product, fundraising, and engineering, building the full stack end to end, from an Objective-C iOS client to a Go/Kubernetes backend.
  • Built the interaction models that set HeyNow apart, such as “Keepers” (jointly saved chat highlights) and “Whispers” (ephemeral private messages), and drove the product to public beta with partners Hill Holliday and Layer.
  • Selected for the PayPal Start Tank accelerator.

Pencil Labs, Inc

2012—2014

Cofounder

2012—2014
  • Cofounded Pencil Labs, a seed-stage NLP startup automating the human side of scheduling, acquired by Airbnb. Raised $1M+ seed (CRV, Matrix) to build an intent-driven scheduling agent using natural language understanding, preference learning, and a workflow engine acting across third party services.
  • Led product, design, and engineering, owning the full product experience and server stack.
  • Pivoted to Wyth, an iOS social calendar with natural-language quick entry, constraint-based event coordination, and a feed to broadcast plans and spark spontaneous meetups.

Vlingo, Inc

2006—2012

Cofounder, Head of User Experience, Senior Software Engineer

2006—2012
  • Cofounded Vlingo, an early mobile speech-recognition and voice-AI company, acquired by Nuance. Supported $50M+ in fundraising (CRV, Sigma, Yahoo!) and won key deals with demos, including one I built on-site in Korea that Samsung's CEO presented at Mobile World Congress.
  • Led design and client-side engineering across iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.
  • Shipped the Vlingo iOS and Android SDKs, adopted by Siri (pre-Apple acquisition) for speech-to-text (STT) and Samsung for STT and intent processing.
  • Co-inventor on 20 mobile speech-recognition patents, including open-vocabulary language-model recognition, usage-based model adaptation, semantic tagging of results, and turning speech into actions.

Full résumé available on request — get in touch.

Projects

Two people wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets sharing a spatially-anchored 3D game anchored between them on a table via Nearby Sharing

Engineering DRI for visionOS 26's Nearby Sharing — co-located Vision Pros share spatially-anchored apps while remote people join as spatial Personas.

Nearby Sharing

2025
Three people on a FaceTime call on Apple Vision Pro, each in a floating tile arranged in the room

Led the engineering teams behind spatial FaceTime and the spatial SharePlay developer APIs on Vision Pro.

FaceTime on Vision Pro

2023

Led the engineering team responsible for delivering the Spatial Persona experience in FaceTime.

Spatial Personas

2023

Built the UIKit animation system behind iPhone X's swipe-up home gesture. Co-inventor on the resulting patent.

iPhone X Home Gesture

2017
Three HeyNow app screens — a chat with a shared photo, a music-sharing picker, and a friends grid

Cofounder & CEO. A consumer iOS messenger for sharing music, photos, and links with close friends — and reliving the highlights together.

HeyNow

2014—2016
Samsung's Voice Talk, powered by Vlingo, shown next to Siri on an iPhone

Cofounder and design & client-engineering lead at this early mobile voice-AI company. SDKs adopted by Siri (pre-Apple) and Samsung.

Vlingo

2006—2012

Talks

Presented by me

Solo presenter to a global developer audience on combining and coordinating multiple animations into interactive, interruptible transitions — including the modern, scrubbable UIViewPropertyAnimator APIs.

Given by my team

Education

Tufts University, School of Engineering

Medford, MA
  • M.S. in Computer Science & Engineering Psychology2006
  • B.S. in Computer Engineering2005