The story
Two strands, one life
One of them paid. The other one I paid for. Around 2018 they stopped being separate.
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The Jewish work
Growing up
Puerto Rico
Born and raised on the island. Through high school I was vice-president of a 200-member Jewish youth movement in San Juan, running the activities, the budget and the fundraising with a fifteen-person board. Summers at a heritage camp in the North Carolina mountains, which taught me my roots and answered a lot of questions I had. And one trip to Israel, in 2006, that stuck.
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The engineering career
At fourteen
Paying customers
Building and programming computers for people in San Juan who paid me for them.
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The engineering career
Four years, then one more
Cornell
Engineering, then a master's. Information science is the study of how to represent the physical world in a digital one, which turns out to be a fair description of everything I have done since. I taught calculus to other students and kept the books for the Hispanic engineers' chapter.
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The engineering career
Three summers running
Goldman Sachs, as an intern
The same trade-processing team three years in a row, building the tools that check the firm's trade records against its own risk system. Somewhere in there I also started running the mentoring program for the incoming interns.
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The engineering career
Then the job itself
The trading floor
Software engineer in Securities technology, on the systems that double-check trades and file the firm's regulatory reports. I built a data-lookup library the whole firm could use, and helped stand up a round-the-clock operation that catches trade errors and fixes them.
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The Jewish work
2013
The archive nobody asked for
In 2013 I started saving Torah classes to disk. Recorded classes, essays, short teachings, anything I could keep. I did not know why I was collecting, and I did it for thirteen years.
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The Jewish work
Every morning, 5:50
The best part of the day
Yeshiva from 5:50 to 8:30, then the floor by nine. The résumé I was writing in those years lists the outreach I was doing with MEOR and Chabad, and one line about what I wanted: to improve Jewish learning “on and offline.” I had no way to do it yet.
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June 2015
Two names, one month
I gave up the “perfect job.” That same month I started two companies - one that takes client work, LazoffTech, and one called TorahTech LLC. The first one has been paying for the second one ever since.
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The Jewish work
The next two years
Getting paid for it
Senior engineer on a learning platform built with a team in Israel and shaped around the Orthodox way of studying, then a rebuild of a Torah video platform. Two years of being paid to build the thing I had been doing for free.
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A NOTE I WROTE MYSELF, ONE MONTH BEFORE MY FIRST DAY IN BLOCKCHAIN
“These books look like any other. But they are actually the records of our sages, generation after generation on the same source, the Torah. It's like the blockchain of history, it's been copied exactly, generation to generation, with very specific rules.”
I then spent six years learning the technology that could test that idea.
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The engineering career
Six years
ConsenSys
I came in through the education arm, building its online learning platform, and stayed six years - ending as the senior engineering manager for every website behind metamask.io and consensys.io.
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The Jewish work
Nights and weekends
Campus outreach
Web copy, program pages and ad campaigns for MEOR, the campus-outreach organization I had been volunteering with five years earlier - including a campaign aimed at my own alma mater. Alongside the day job.
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The engineering career
Three and a half years
Chainlink Labs
Contract engineer inside Chainlink - a company that feeds real-world data like prices and events onto blockchains - building the sites and tools its developers rely on. The contract ran through TorahTech LLC: the blockchain income flowed through the Torah company.
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The engineering career
2023
A machine in the house
Everything the career taught - connecting information, making it findable, running systems that do not lose things - pointed at one product: private AI on hardware you own, sitting on your own shelf.
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The Jewish work
Now
OpenRabbi
The archive that started in 2013, rebuilt as a graph you can question. Every rabbinic teaching in it carries its Hebrew source and a reference you can look up, linked to the verses it turns on - and the AI voices on top of it cite what they say or say nothing at all.
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The idea held
Did the idea hold up?
It held. The whole thing turns on one rule, the oldest rule on the shelf, and I wrote it straight into the code: report a teaching in the name of the one who said it, or say nothing at all. Every answer has to name a real source you can go and look up, and if it cannot find one it stays quiet. That rule is what makes the machine honest.
The discipline that makes a machine cite a 900-year-old commentary, or admit it doesn't know, is the same discipline inside the box I now ship to customers. That box is Digital Twin Pro.