Grow the team
Build a team with clear expectations and room to grow. Hire thoughtfully, coach consistently, and make career progression concrete.
Bellingham, WA · Remote (US)
Jay Brownlee
Engineering Manager
Teams, delivery & platform strategy.
- 20+
- Years building platforms
- 18
- Engineers led over 3.5 years
- 75%
- Processing costs cut
~$275K saved annually - $2–3M
- Monthly cloud spend
processed by billing platform
01 / About
Good systems start
with strong teams.
I build teams that take ownership, and platforms that stand up to scale. My experience spans Dell.com at billion-dollar scale and secure healthcare in the cloud. At ClearDATA, I grew from senior engineer to engineering manager, founded the first Data Engineering team, and led the people behind the company’s data and FinOps platforms.
I lead by setting clear goals and technical guardrails, coaching engineers toward independent ownership, and staying accountable for outcomes.
02 / How I work
People. Delivery. Architecture.
Create clarity
Connect technical strategy to delivery. Set direction, align stakeholders, and give engineers ownership of the path forward.
Simplify the system
Turn complex data and cloud platforms into reliable foundations that teams can understand, operate, and evolve.
03 / Selected impact
Better foundations. Lasting results.
ClearDATA / Platform strategy
From fragmented services
to a shared foundation.
Set the architecture and guardrails for a year-long migration of ~20 repositories. Guided the team toward standardized queue, database, and container patterns, restoring service for the largest enterprise accounts.
~70% less redundant code
ClearDATA / FinOps
Make month-end
boringly reliable.
Led the billing rewrite from ~10 repositories to three core services. Eliminated chronic revenue-processing failures while supporting more customer data at a fraction of the processing cost.
10 → 5 hrs nightly processing time
04 / Experience
A career of building & leading.
May 2025 – Present
Independent
Career Sabbatical & AI Development
A planned sabbatical, followed by designing, building, and shipping AI products since May 2026: a multi-model LLM orchestration platform and an educational web application.
Role highlights
- Built AI products with TypeScript and Python and deployed them on Google Cloud (GCP), using Cloud Run, Firestore, and PostgreSQL. Used Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex for AI-assisted development.
Nov 2021 – Apr 2025
ClearDATA
Engineering Manager
Founded the company’s first Data Engineering team and led the Blue full-stack feature team. Owned technical strategy, delivery, and project management for the data and FinOps platforms.
Role highlights
- Hired five engineers and managed 18 over 3.5 years, with up to 10 at a time across teams and time zones.
- Served as project manager and scrum master for Data and the six-engineer Blue team, owning roadmaps, release plans, and stakeholder reporting.
- Co-authored the Engineering Competency Matrix and coached engineers toward independent system-design ownership.
- Guided a year-long migration from ~20 repositories, removing ~70% of redundant code and restoring service for the largest enterprise accounts.
- Owned data requirements for 250+ AWS safeguards and established the data foundation for the company’s first AI initiative.
May 2017 – Nov 2021
ClearDATA
Senior Software Engineer · Lead Engineer & Architect, FinOps/Billing
Led the four-engineer FinOps/Billing team’s ground-up rewrite of the billing and financial reporting platform processing $2–3M in monthly customer cloud spend.
Role highlights
- Consolidated ~10 repositories into three core services; cut processing costs 75% (~$275K annually).
- Halved nightly runtimes from 10 hours to five while expanding the dataset, and eliminated chronic month-end failures.
- Built cloud-usage collection across thousands of AWS accounts, integrated Salesforce pricing, and developed Redshift ETL pipelines.
- Designed, built, and managed the business intelligence platform for Product, Support, and Finance.
Mar 2016 – Feb 2017
Help.com
Senior Software Engineer
Built Node.js microservices and a queue-worker architecture for a live-chat platform on GCP.
Role highlights
- Led code and design reviews with 90%+ test coverage and mentored junior engineers.
Aug 2008 – Mar 2015
Leaf Group
Senior Software Engineer
Built applications for freelance communities producing text, photo, and video content at scale, plus machine-learning pipelines with Hadoop, SQL, and Python.
Earlier career Dell, The Home Depot, The Knot & Topaz +
2007 – 2008
Topaz Technologies
Senior Software Developer
Built an FDA-compliance reporting system and helped lead the transition to Scrum and Test-Driven Development.
2006 – 2007
The Home Depot
Lead Software Engineer
Designed and built a J2EE application replacing employee time tracking across all U.S. stores, with distributed, fault-tolerant data retrieval.
2005 – 2006
XO Group (The Knot)
Lead Developer
Led a full-stack re-architecture of membership services for theknot.com.
1997 – 2005
Dell
Lead Engineer & Architect
Led three engineers on Dell.com Membership Services as annual online revenue scaled past $1 billion. Architected globally redundant infrastructure with only a few hours of unplanned downtime per year.
Role highlights
- Internationalized the platform across 14 EMEA and Asia-Pacific countries.
- Led the team that earned Dell’s first online customer-profile patent, US 6,862,612.
05 / Projects
Still building. Always learning.
Independent AI product development since May 2026.
Multi-model orchestration
Polyvise
A shared TypeScript debate engine and professional debate workspace, exploring how multiple language models can reason through a question together.
Explore Polyvise ↗Educational AI application
DebateFrog
Structured, evidence-backed debates between language models. A space to explore different perspectives, with live evidence retrieval and model evaluation.
Explore DebateFrog ↗Technical foundation
Python · SQL · Go · Node.js / TypeScript · GraphQL · PostgreSQL · GraphDB · Redshift · BigQuery · Terraform · AWS / GCP / Azure · Kubernetes · Applied LLMs · RAG
Education
Boise State University
Computer Information Systems
Get in touch
Let’s build something
that lasts.
Engineering leadership. Thoughtful architecture. Strong teams.
brownlee.jay@gmail.com