Steven M. Ledbetter

(845) 379-0641

Sharon, CT

Summary

Daily Claude Code power user who builds resource allocation and capacity planning systems at scale. 20 years in product management, three successful exits. At Meta, designed an intent-based semantic layer for workload scheduling with SLA-driven prioritization, preemption policies, and continuous auto-optimization across thousands of concurrent jobs — the same class of problems that define GPU cluster orchestration.

Employment

Meta

2023 – Present

Delivering the most performant data pipelines in the world.

Product Manager, AI & Data Infrastructure

  • Own the acceleration stack for data pipeline performance, including co-location optimization, capacity partitioning, and caching layers with strong consistency guarantees.
  • Developed an intent API and semantic layer where workload authors declared SLAs (latency, freshness, QPS, capacity budgets) and the system continuously auto-optimized physical storage, caching, and materialized views.
  • Led capacity conversations for 20+ internal customers with their finance and capacity teams, securing temporary capacity bumps during architecture migrations before utilization gains were realized.
  • Built observability dashboards and capacity planning models for infrastructure health, utilization tracking, and demand forecasting.

Supernatural (acquired by Meta)

2022 – 2023

Led product through acquisition by Meta.

VP of Product

  • 3x ARR and 2x user retention across millions of members; described as "the closest Meta ever came to realizing the metaverse" (Pranav Dixit, Business Insider).
  • Guided product through $400M+ acquisition by Meta, surviving an FTC antitrust challenge.
  • Built 0-1 real-time multiplayer infrastructure supporting 10k+ concurrent users with Vivox voice chat across distributed systems.
  • Led a team of 17 PMs, UXR, and Program Managers through hypergrowth and acquisition.

Elevate Security (acquired by Mimecast)

2020 – 2022

First product hire; built and steered product team to acquisition.

VP of Product

  • First product hire; built the Product Team from scratch including PMs, POs, Designers, and Technical Writers.
  • Co-inventor, US12149553B1: ML risk-scoring model and automated intervention system — involved in requirements, model selection, evaluation design, and tuning.
  • Scaled platform products serving multi-stakeholder enterprise customers with complex trade-offs.
  • Pivoted company to new products that 2x ARR with a 60 NPS score and less than 5% churn.

Tonal

2018 – 2020

Owned engagement experience, pre-launch through scale.

Director of Product Management, Engagement

  • Joined pre-launch as the first PM working horizontally across hardware, firmware, software, and content teams, shipping a unified product experience across embedded, mobile, and watchOS surfaces.
  • Owned the end-to-end system integration across embedded firmware, cloud services, and client applications with strict latency and reliability constraints.
  • Increased engagement 2x and customer satisfaction 50% through data-driven experimentation and metrics instrumentation across the full stack.
  • Developed automated content production pipeline and workflows that increased output 27x.

Habitry (acquired by Lift The Bar)

2013 – 2018

Co-founded, built, and sold.

CEO, Head of Product, Co-Founder

  • Co-founded and sold a Motivation Science consultancy; built an iOS behavior change platform with 72% daily adherence and 68% retention at 365 days, serving 16,000 users across 6 continents.
Education

University of Chicago

2004

Bachelors in Philosophy

Harvard University

2001

Undergraduate Coursework in Economics

John F. Kennedy University

2014

Masters in Sport Psychology

Writing

https://smledbetter.com/blog

Blog series on AI-native product management — sprint methodology with AI agents, coaching agent teams, and building encrypted apps with LLMs.

Skills

Product Leadership

Scheduling & Orchestration

Capacity Planning

Observability & Tooling

Data Infrastructure

Agentic AI & LLMs

Machine Learning

API Development

Open Source Projects

Nexa Scheduler

https://github.com/smledbetter/Nexa-scheduler

Compliance-aware workload scheduler for GPU and CPU clusters on Kubernetes.

  • Built a privacy-first Kubernetes scheduler enforcing data sovereignty, org isolation, and confidential compute constraints at scheduling time — including topology-aware GPU placement and gang-scheduling for multi-node training jobs.
  • Fail-closed design with preemption policies and quota enforcement ensures pods stay Pending rather than compromise isolation guarantees.
  • Full audit trail of every placement decision with structured JSON logging and Prometheus metrics for queue depth, scheduling efficiency, and resource utilization.

Flowstate

https://github.com/smledbetter/flowstate

Sprint-based development workflow framework for Claude Code.

  • Quality gate framework with automated checks (tests, types, lint, coverage) for AI-assisted development.
  • Three-phase sprint structure (Think, Execute, Ship) that prevents scope drift on complex work.
  • Metrics pipeline tracking token usage, session time, test counts, and code coverage across sprints.

Weaveto.do

https://github.com/smledbetter/Weaveto.do

Privacy-first, agent-augmented task coordination for decentralized teams.

  • End-to-end encrypted task coordination platform using Olm/Megolm (vodozemac WASM) with zero-knowledge relay.
  • WASM-sandboxed custom agents with encrypted state and Ed25519 signature verification.
  • No accounts — device-bound identity via WebAuthn PRF with ephemeral-by-design encryption keys.

Uluka

https://github.com/smledbetter/Uluka

Security claim verification CLI for code.

  • Extracts security claims from comments, README, and JSDoc, then verifies they match actual implementation.
  • Multi-language code parsing via Tree-sitter with taint-tracking data flow analysis across files.
  • Optional Claude-powered verification for nuanced security properties, with deterministic rules running first.