Brandon Clark

Hi, I'm Brandon

Principal Engineer & Problem Solver

I am a veteran software engineer, solutions architect, product manager and engineering leader with decades of experience managing teams and I'm passionate about solving business problems with custom and turnkey technology solutions. How can I help you grow your business?

About Me

For me, computing quickly grew from a childhood hobby to an obsession and ultimately into a life long career of leveraging technology to solve all kinds of problems.

I have a passion for problem solving and I have decades of experience building technology solutions, architecting scalable platforms, and managing teams with strong track records for delivering results. I've worn many hats in my career, from basic software developer, to devops, to engineering manager, to product manager to CTO. Whatever your engineering needs are my skills can help you grow your business.

I have a proven track record of scaling solutions to handle high availability and concurrency needs for large scale web applications. The most recent example of this is the scaling of Digital Trends, a humble WordPress site, to a platform capable of handling more than 30 million monthly unique users. At Digital Trends I also built out an engineering organization starting with only myself and growing it to multiple teams including software engineering, devops, QA, data engineering, and analytics. My diverse experience gives me a unique perspective on how to leverage people and technology to scale a business.

With the recent advances in AI and LLM technologies I have been able to elevate myself further and realize the full potential of my skills. By combining my experience as a systems architect with AI based automation, I am capable of delivering the productivity of multiple engineers without sacrificing comprehension or code quality. I will be a strong asset for any business at any stage of AI adoption.

Experience

Principal Engineer

Soqratic Studios Inc, Portland, Oregon

2025 - Present

  • Platform Development: Built python based platform with custom RAG, LLM integration, Stripe based subscription system

Senior Director of Product & Engineering

DigitalTrends Media Group, Portland, Oregon

2021 - Present

  • Product Management: Worked with C-Suite and director level stakeholders to improve operational efficiency and support publishing and revenue operations
  • Principal Engineering: Architected distributed web applications, developer tooling, publishing workflow tools and automation systems
  • Cost Optimization: Led initiatives to reduce operational costs for web and data infrastructure
  • Growth Hacking: Led initiatives to optimize user acquisition, conversions, and revenue
  • Data Engineering and Analytics: Built and maintained data warehouse infrastructure and supported business analytics tools
  • Technical SEO: Led initiatives to optimize web performance and site architecture to grow organic search traffic for large media websites

Director of Engineering

DigitalTrends Media Group, Portland, Oregon

2017 - 2021

  • Scaled up engineering teams: Scaled up and managed global engineering org focused on software development, QA, devops and support
  • Established best practices: Created SOPs for agile/SCRUM workflows, software design patterns, QA, release management, incident response, and on-call rotations
  • Principal Engineering: Architected scalable web platforms, custom wordpress plugins, developer tooling and product prototypes
  • Mentorship and Career pathing: Cultivated highly productive engineering teams through mentorship, peer review, and educational initiatives

DevOps Manager

DigitalTrends Media Group, Portland, Oregon

2013 - 2017

  • Platform scalability and reliability: Built and maintained high availability web infrastructure. Scaled web applications to support 30MM+ users
  • Improved developer velocity: Unified codebase for multiple web applications, built developer tooling and introduced unit testing framework
  • Modernized platform infrastructure: Adopted platform as code methodology and containerized publishing platform

Senior Web Developer

DigitalTrends Media Group, Portland, Oregon

2011 - 2013

  • Custom WordPress development: Enhanced content publishing capabilities and improved site performance. Developed custom plugins, themes, and integrations with 3rd party APIs
  • Established engineering team: Joined company as developer #1 and grew engineering team to support multiple web applications
  • Web infrastructure administration: Maintained web server and SQL database configurations

Senior Web Developer

eROI (Thesis), Portland, Oregon

2007 - 2011

  • Custom web development: Developed high profile custom web applications for agency clients

Chief Information Officer

Motor Whiskey LLC, Oregon City, Oregon

2010 - 2013

  • Managed IT solutions and web commerce infrastructure, contributing to marketing and business development initiatives

Senior IT Administrator/Software Developer

Hydra Fuel Cell Corp, Hillsboro, Oregon

2005 - 2007

  • Managed IT infrastructure, developed custom web applications and embedded software

NQL Technician

Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, Oregon

2004 - 2005

  • Executed test plans for network hardware drivers on Unix/Linux platforms

Senior IT Administrator

Shinei/Solectron, Hillsboro, Oregon

2005 - 2007

  • Managed IT infrastructure, SQL database and ERP platform

Education

Associates Degree - Computer Programming

Solano Community College

2001

Skills

Core Skills

Principal Engineering Solutions Architecture Software Development DevOps/SRE Product Management Data Engineering Cloud Infrastructure Distributed Systems Linux Administration CI/CD Pipelines Data ETL Pipelines Agile/SCRUM Incident Response LLMs/Prompt Engineering Technical SEO Team Management

Programming Languages

JavaScript TypeScript Python PHP Golang Rust Ruby Java C/C++ C#/.NET SQL Bash Script GraphQL

Frameworks & Platforms

Node.js React.js WordPress Ruby on Rails Zend Framework Docker Terraform

AI & ML Tools

Ollama vLLM LMStudio Custom RAG Cursor ClaudeCode

Infrastructure & Services

AWS GCP Lambda API Gateway Nginx Apache Memcache Redis CloudFront Fastly Akamai

Data & Analytics

MySQL MariaDB PostgreSQL Snowflake BigQuery Elasticsearch OpenSearch Dataflow Apache Beam Snowplow Analytics

DevOps & Tools

GitHub Workflows Linux/Unix DNS Administration Content Management Systems

Get In Touch

I'm always open to discussing new opportunities and interesting projects.