Brian Williams

Reports to the CTO. Owns architecture, implementation, and technical direction across core platform initiatives - designing and building the systems personally while setting the standards the team executes against.

• Architected and built a high-scale inventory pipeline, growing throughput from ~3M to 250M+ UPCs/day (83x) using an event-driven, Pub/Sub-based architecture triggered by file delivery.
• Architected and built the catalog bundle system, replacing error-prone manual CSV/Excel editing with a validation-enforced, automated pipeline that applies consistent normalization on every run - consuming, standardizing, processing, and promoting catalog data at 7.5B+ rows/day.
• Replaced a legacy processor prone to OOM failures and with no horizontal scaling path with cloud function architectures written in Python and Golang, eliminating idle infrastructure cost and enabling on-demand scaling across a platform serving 60M+ monthly shoppers and 65k+ retail partners.
• Built intelligent header detection across 10,000s of unstandardized file formats using heuristics with AI fallback, achieving a 90%+ auto-mapping success rate and cutting per-client file mapping from 1-3 hours to under a minute.
• Built the API service layer for a proprietary trained LLM-based taxonomy classification system, replacing manual classification of every new UPC with instant automated classification driven by product data attributes.
• Designed a BigQuery-based validation and diffing layer across billions of records to catch data quality issues - duplicate and invalid UPCs, invalid pricing, missing data, and missing images - before they reach retail partners.
• Owned technical delivery of Retail Campaign Studio (2023) and Storefronts (2024), platform launches extending self-service advertising and retail presence capabilities to 65k+ retail partners and 1,000s of brands reaching 60M+ monthly shoppers.
• Set technical direction for 20+ engineers through architecture reviews, API and integration design standards, and data modeling; owned security, compliance, performance, and scalability reviews - defining the standards the full team builds against.

CTO and primary engineer at a bootstrapped call center platform. Owned all technical decisions, system architecture, infrastructure, and hands-on delivery from concept to production.

• Stabilized platform following a failed enterprise migration and architected Focus - a full replacement for a 20+ year legacy system - delivering greater scale, client integration capabilities, and mobile-link availability that became central to the company's acquisition by AnswerNet.
• Designed and built a custom DSL for call flow orchestration, cutting script buildout from 30+ days to hours - enabling non-technical users to design and modify call flows at runtime with built-in A/B testing and staged rollout.
• Designed and built EZTPV, a hybrid web and call center verification system; the resulting model reduced the company's call center footprint from 3 facilities to 1 by shifting the majority of verification workflows to automated web-based processing.
• Designed and built API platforms and integration layers enabling external partnerships and product capability expansion.
• Replaced manual script uploads to co-located dedicated machines with a GitHub Actions and AWS Elastic Beanstalk CI/CD pipeline - enabling up to 30 zero-downtime deployments per day.

Hands-on principal engineer at Dell's software division. IC architect and technical lead, designing enterprise platform infrastructure through the division's acquisition and relaunch as Quest Software.

• Invented and developed a containerized appliance solution for enterprise software lifecycle management, reducing customer setup time from days to minutes and eliminating manual configuration errors.
• Architected a unified deployment platform for standardized application lifecycle management, enabling consistent deployments across multiple environments and cloud platforms.
• Designed an extensible plugin architecture supporting multiple container orchestration and cloud platforms.
• Built comprehensive business intelligence platform enabling predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and operational insights for large-scale distributed systems.
• Led data engineering initiatives analyzing petabyte-scale datasets to drive product improvements and customer success outcomes.
• Architected multi-cloud integration strategy supporting enterprise customers across diverse cloud platforms and hybrid environments.
• Established DevOps best practices and database optimization strategies, improving system performance and reducing operational overhead.

Hybrid engineering role at a cloud management startup acquired by Dell; platform rebranded as Dell Cloud Manager post-acquisition. Operated across pre-sales, enterprise implementation, training, support, and platform development - driving adoption across Fortune 500 companies and government entities from Series A through acquisition.

• Drove pre-sales engagements, on-site enterprise training, and proof-of-concept implementations across 20+ Fortune 500 and government clients - contributing to customer acquisition that fueled growth from Series A through acquisition by Dell.
• Delivered cloud architecture consulting and on-site technical engagements to enterprise and government clients, establishing the platform credibility that supported Dell Cloud Manager's post-acquisition commercial launch.
• Architected and implemented infrastructure automation solutions supporting multi-cloud deployments at enterprise scale.