Nathan Payne
Most product decisions are invisible—until they aren’t.
Over the past ten years, I worked on the streaming platforms behind Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. I started at MLB.com and BAMTECH, joined Disney through the 2017 acquisition, and spent the last five years leading the Native Client Platform across PlayStation, Xbox, Amazon Fire TV, Linux set-top boxes, and smart TVs.
The work that interests me is usually hiding at a boundary—between systems, between sources of truth, or between what a product claims and what it can actually prove. A codec mismatch, an ambiguous financial rule, and an AI agent that knows a policy but doesn’t follow it are versions of the same product problem: uncertainty that somebody eventually has to resolve. I like turning that ambiguity into something explicit enough to design, test, and operate.
The current boundary is where AI coding agents meet real product work. I build end-to-end with Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor under an enforcement system I designed to catch the failure modes agents miss. The interesting part isn’t generation speed; it’s deciding what to trust, what to measure, and where a human or a machine needs authority. Open to senior product and platform roles—especially where streaming infrastructure, developer tools, or AI-augmented workflows are the center of gravity.
Read my résuméSelected writing on shipping software with AI coding agents—scope, review, and the decisions that don’t show up in the diff.