# About Dave Brown > I've spent my career at the point where technical decisions become business decisions. I'm a technology executive with over twenty years leading engineering organizations and building the software systems that run underneath real businesses. My work has ranged from principal-level architecture to running teams of twenty-plus engineers, but the throughline is the same: I get pulled in when a technical decision is really a business decision, and someone needs to own both sides of it. I've built and scaled engineering teams from a handful of people to twenty or more, taken greenfield ecommerce platforms from nothing to systems handling well over $100M in monthly revenue, and overhauled data infrastructure for a billion-dollar company. I've also been the first technical hire — the CTO building infrastructure from scratch, alone, before there was a team to hand it to. That range, from hands-on builder to executive managing multiple teams and reporting lines, shapes how I advise: I've usually already sat in the seat I'm being asked about. What stays consistent across those situations is a bias toward clarity: naming the actual decision in front of a team, being honest about trade-offs and costs, and giving people the context to make good calls without me in the room. I'd rather ship the boring, defensible architecture than the impressive one, and I've found that the teams that grow fastest are the ones with the most clarity about what they're actually being asked to do. More recently I've started building a personal brand from zero, in public, and saying so plainly — translating AI research and twenty years of career and management lessons into practical advice, including the parts that are genuinely new and uncomfortable for someone who wasn't on social media a year ago. It turned into a real audience faster than I expected. If you're a podcast, an event, or a brand, [there's a page for that](https://davecto.com/media). ## Career timeline ### Chief Technology Officer, Glazier Software, New York, NY 2023 — Present Lead product strategy and technical architecture for a vertical SaaS platform serving glass and glazing contractors. Built and scaled the engineering organization delivering the project management, invoicing, and operational systems customers use as their system of record — including the glass industry's first AI-powered takeoff tool, built on proprietary computer vision models. Partner directly with sales and executive leadership, contributing to roughly 75% of closed deals and about $750K in new revenue. ### Engineering Lead, Leaf Advertising, New York, NY 2023 Led mobile, backend, and frontend teams (6 engineers) delivering high-scale advertising systems on Angular and Node.js, hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Rewrote a high-volume data processing pipeline handling millions of transactions, cutting infrastructure costs by 90% and improving performance 10x. ### Director - Data Engineering & BI, Cresco Labs, New York, NY 2019 — 2023 Started as principal engineer on a greenfield ecommerce platform, then built and managed a team of 4 data engineers, 1 data scientist, and 7 BI resources (including 1 manager) supporting a 3,000-person, ~$1B-revenue company. Built the ecommerce backend responsible for $125M in monthly revenue and overhauled the data warehouse architecture using Docker, ECS, Airflow, and Python. ### Senior Engineering Manager, Detection, White Ops, New York, NY 2018 — 2019 Managed a diverse team of 15 hackers, engineers, and data scientists fighting fraud on applications serving trillions of transactions per day, growing the team from 5 to 15 in four months. Drove adoption of unit testing and canary deployments, and delivered a fraud-detection capability largely responsible for the company earning its mobile advertising certification. ### Chief Technology Officer, Leblum, New York, NY 2017 — 2018 Designed and built the infrastructure for a greenfield, scalable ecommerce platform — a mobile application, backend dashboard, and microservices — using Express, Node, and MongoDB. Built a Docker and Rancher deployment architecture enabling zero-downtime deployments to Digital Ocean. ### Director of Engineering, IDM & AppBuilder, Infor Global Solutions, Prague, Czech Republic 2016 — 2017 Managed three teams across three application suites — 20 direct and indirect reports — growing them from 6 to 20 developers. Drove adoption of scrum, quarterly planning, and unit testing, and led the migration of client applications from Angular 1.6 to Angular 4 alongside a new REST API layer on Express, Mongoose, and MongoDB. ### Senior Software Engineering Manager (Director equivalent), Expedia, Inc., Denver, CO 2008 — 2016 Joined as software architect on a new vacation rental management product and left running four teams — 2 managers and 25 direct and indirect reports — across a service-oriented rewrite of two monolithic applications. Architected the distributed rate quoting engine behind Expedia's vacation rental inventory, generating at least 750,000 fully-calculated quotes per second and making sort-by-price possible across a per-owner, highly configurable rate engine; named inventor on U.S. patent US20170132695A1, since abandoned. Launched three products on or ahead of schedule: a REST API, an automated payments module, and a version-control module for teams sharing a code base. ## Outside of work When I'm not working, I'm probably in the garden, getting dragged around the yard by my golden retriever, or out on the river fly fishing for trout. Weekends usually mean a rod, a dog, and whatever the weather decides to do — a little rain has never been enough to keep me off the water. ## Get in touch Available for a small number of conversations. Email [hi@davecto.com](mailto:hi@davecto.com) or see [Contact](https://davecto.com/contact). --- Dave Brown · CTO & Executive Advisor · New York, NY · [hi@davecto.com](mailto:hi@davecto.com) Site guide for agents: [llms.txt](https://davecto.com/llms.txt) · Sitemap: [sitemap.xml](https://davecto.com/sitemap.xml) · Any page is available as Markdown by sending `Accept: text/markdown` or adding `.md` to its URL.