Stephen Brandon

About Stephen Brandon

Army veteran, engineering leader, and author with 20+ years building high-performing teams and shipping meaningful technology. Lately I’ve been deep in local-first AI—launching drep-ai for automated code reviews, creating the open-agent-sdk for tool-using agents on personal hardware, and scaling bespoke RAG systems for writers and researchers.I still specialize in engineering management, cloud optimization, and data privacy, and I pair that with the new wave of LLM infrastructure to deliver measurable outcomes that actually respect cost, privacy, and control.As an author, I’ve published nonfiction on engineering leadership, AWS cost optimization, and data privacy, alongside fiction under the pen name E.S. Brandon (science fiction romance and romantasy). When I’m not building teams or writing novels, I’m usually behind a camera—flexing creativity and exploring new perspectives.

Experience

1. Engineering Manager, Cloud Infrastructure & Data Storage

   Brex

   Jan 2022 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Adopted agentic coding workflows with Claude Code in day-to-day development, coached teammates on prompt hygiene, and became the go-to advocate for these practices across engineering.Built Brex’s first internal MCP so developers can query the monorepo, surface best practices, kick off Bazel builds, and streamline onboarding in one place.Founded the Data Storage team and standardized fleet operations with living runbooks and lightweight AI diagnostics, improving service ownership.Consolidated hundreds of RDS PostgreSQL instances into a manageable, high-performance fleet with shared observability and automated remediation.Created Temporal workflows that coordinate complex, multi-phase database upgrades with zero downtime and reproducible guardrails.Led a cross-functional program delivering regional database disaster recovery, materially improving fault tolerance and RTO/RPO across AWS regions.Reduced AWS infrastructure costs by more than 60% year over year through architecture reviews, rightsizing efforts, and targeted cost modeling.Partnered with Finance to align cloud spend with business priorities and give leadership forward-looking visibility into infra investment.Recruited and hired across backend, product, infrastructure, frontend, and intern pipelines; conducted hundreds of interviews and dozens of 360s.Helped multiple engineers grow from Senior to Staff and coached others through successful transitions into Engineering Management.Drove technical strategy and multi-quarter planning for critical platform initiatives in partnership with product, security, data, and finance leaders.Championed a team culture centered on growth, candid feedback, inclusion, and consistent 1:1s that led to sustained engagement scores.

Education

• Western Governors University

  Bachelor's degree, Network and System Administration/Administrator

  2007 — 2009

Skills

• System Administration
• Desktop Support
• Help Desk Support
• Virtualization
• User Management
• IT Management
• Domain Name System (Dns)
• Active Directory
• Xp
• Windows Server
• Hardware
• Problem Solving
• A+ Certified
• Information Technology
• Sharepoint
• Vmware
• Vendor Management
• Windows 7
• Windows
• Dns
• Network Administration
• Troubleshooting
• Deployment
• Windows Xp
• System Deployment
• Servers
• Computer Hardware
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2003
• Software Documentation
• Technical Support
• Documentation
• Linux