Jay Brownlee

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

Help.com

Senior Software Engineer

Built Node.js microservices and a queue-worker architecture for a live-chat platform on GCP.

• Led code and design reviews with 90%+ test coverage and mentored junior engineers.

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.

Topaz Technologies

Senior Software Developer

Built an FDA-compliance reporting system and helped lead the transition to Scrum and Test-Driven Development.

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.

XO Group (The Knot)

Lead Developer

Led a full-stack re-architecture of membership services for theknot.com.

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.

• 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.