Jay Brownlee

Architect & Operator

• Designing and shipping educational web applications solo, using AI-assisted development workflows end to end.

Engineering Manager, Data Engineering

Founded the company's first Data Engineering team and served as its principal architect, owning strategy, design, and delivery of the platform at the heart of ClearDATA's product — continuous HIPAA-compliance assessment and automated remediation of customer cloud environments.

• Built and led a team of senior engineers that architected and delivered a new message-driven backend for the company's flagship product; it became the foundation of ClearDATA's data and AI capabilities.
• Replaced a sprawling, failure-prone stack of single-purpose Lambdas — recomputing in-memory joins and rollups against DynamoDB on every page view — with an event pipeline and PostgreSQL store that pre-computes results as source data changes, vastly simplifying the platform and cutting the cost of serving customers at scale.
• Restored full application functionality for the largest enterprise accounts, which the prior architecture could not serve at all due to data volume.
• Drove consolidation of 20+ GitLab repositories, eliminating roughly 70% redundant code and standardizing queues, databases, and container patterns across services — increasing system uptime while reducing maintenance costs.
• Coached the team through adopting the new patterns, raising feature velocity, platform stability, and developer satisfaction across the organization; partnered with product, finance, and customer-facing teams on roadmap and delivery.

Senior Software Engineer

• Owned core components of the SaaS backend, compliance rule processing, customer reporting, internal reporting, and financial and billing systems.
• Conceived, designed, and led a ground-up rearchitecture of billing and invoicing — the most complex business logic in the company — collapsing ~10 mixed Node.js, Python, and Go repositories into 3, with a single Python monorepo holding ~80% of the system.
• Cut the cost of producing invoices and financial calculations by 75% — from $31K to ~$8K per month, saving ~$275K annually.
• Halved the nightly billing run from ~10 hours to ~5 while onboarding more customers and adding Microsoft and Google cloud data to a previously AWS-only system — more data, more processing steps, less compute, lower cost.
• Eliminated the chronic end-of-month billing failures that had forced monthly fire drills for the finance team for years.
• Engineers cited the consolidated system as dramatically easier to work in; the architecture was later forked to become the foundation of the flagship product.

Senior Software Engineer

• Built and maintained Node.js microservices and a queue-worker architecture powering a live-chat platform and email/message delivery (Node.js, Socket.io, Couchbase, PostgreSQL, Redis, NATS.io, React/Redux, Docker, Kubernetes on GCP).
• Authored shared npm packages; led code and design reviews enforcing standards for style, async flow, error handling, and query optimization with 90%+ test coverage; mentored junior engineers.

Senior Software Engineer

• Designed and built a suite of applications used by freelance communities to produce custom text, photo, and video content at scale.
• Built machine-learning systems to refine and score large datasets using Hadoop, SQL, Python, and a custom multi-threaded pipeline; supported production systems.