James Brown

About James Brown

Infrastructure and full-stack developer with a background in system and network administration, information security, and web application development. Which sounds like a weird mix of things, but is sort of useful for SaaS-y startups. Competent at writing a Rails app from scratch, turning a cage full of blank SuperMicro pizza boxes and Juniper network equipment into a useful production environment, managing large and high-concurrency MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, setting up MDM/DEP/VPP/etc to do IT support for a fleet of desktop Macs, or designing an IS program to get through a SOC 2 audit. Have been a key technical contributor at multiple startups that successfully IPO\'d.I really love Rust, which is a beautiful language, but spend a lot more practical time writing Python and Ruby. Prefer managing MySQL; prefer writing applications against PostgreSQL; surprisingly, I actually like Cassandra a lot in its modern incarnations. Almost 25 years of Linux experience, but relatively minimal experience administrating Windows, BSD, or other server platforms. I always set -euo pipefail.

Experience

1. Rust Backend Engineer

   Svix

   Jul 2025 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   Making software to help web applications communicate. Svix is a very small startup (6 engineers); the backend is Rust and PostgreSQL on AWS. Some responsibilities- Setting up and owning Kubernetes (on EKS, managed with Terraform)- Deploying and owning Clickhouse as an OLAP datastore; building ingestion pipeline; etc- Setting up and owning Prometheus / Grafana for monitoring & alerting- Operating an office in San Francisco, doing in-person events, etc- Writing various internal and user-facing Rust and Python code

Education

• Harvey Mudd College

  B.S., Computer Science

  2006 — 2010

Skills

• Node.js
• Mysql
• Apache
• Git
• Bash
• C
• Programming
• Integration
• Debian
• Memes
• Haskell
• System Administration
• Vlsi
• Network Administration
• Arm
• Software Development
• Python
• Unix
• C#
• Linux
• Rust
• Coffee
• Cat Herding
• Os X
• Opengl
• Shell Scripting
• Perl
• Ruby
• Bourne
• Web Development
• C++