Hi, I'm Joe.

I've spent ~20 years defining and building new ways for people to interact with computers and with each other, as an engineering leader who still designs and builds.

I'm happiest at the start of things: building new products on brand-new platforms, new interaction models, new teams. Lately that means spatial computing, real-time copresence, and AI agents in production.

Shipped at scaleFaceTime, Spatial Personas, Nearby Sharing, and SharePlay on Vision Pro; the Home Gesture on iOS and iPadOS.

San Francisco, CA

Experience

Apple, Inc

Cupertino, CA

Senior Engineering Manager, Vision Products Group

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, Vision Products Group

2021—2025
  • Led the engineering teams that shipped FaceTime and Spatial Personas on Vision Pro.
  • Shaped Apple's spatial conferencing and Spatial Persona experiences, defining new interaction models in close collaboration with design.
  • Grew the team from a handful of engineers into the org that shipped FaceTime on Vision Pro.

Senior Software Engineer, Vision Products Group

2018—2021
  • Led bring-up of several visionOS apps and experiences, including Messages, People, and FaceTime.
  • Built, managed, and scaled the visionOS Messages and People team.
  • 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

Boston, MA

Cofounder, CEO

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

Pencil Labs, Inc

Cambridge, MA

Cofounder

2012—2014
  • Cofounded Pencil Labs, a seed-stage NLP startup automating 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 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 entry and constraint-based event coordination.

Vlingo, Inc

Cambridge, MA

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) and Samsung for speech-to-text and intent processing.
  • Co-inventor on 20 mobile speech-recognition patents, including open-vocabulary recognition, usage-based model adaptation, semantic tagging, and turning speech into actions.

Full résumé available on request — get in touch.

Projects

Nearby Sharing

2025

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

Spatial Personas in FaceTime

2023

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

FaceTime on Vision Pro

2023

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

iPhone X Home Gesture

2017

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

HeyNow

2014—2016
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.

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