← Back

A.J. BROWN

Engineering Leader & Technologist

Dayton Metropolitan Area | aj@ajbrown.org

linkedin.com/in/ajbrown | | github.com/ajbrown

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Engineering leader and technologist with 20+ years building and shipping products at scale. Spent five years as Principal Engineer / Platform Segment Lead at Sonatype, owning the architecture of cloud-native, event-driven systems serving 15M+ developers across 2,000+ organizations. Now leads AI Product and Platform delivery at McGraw Hill, where I help engineering teams adopt agentic tooling responsibly. Equally at home setting technical direction as a senior IC and leading product delivery teams as a manager. Author of the Agentic Software Delivery methodology.

CORE COMPETENCIES

Distributed Systems & Cloud: AWS (15+ years — EC2, ECS, Lambda, EventBridge, Kinesis, RDS, DynamoDB, S3) | Event-Driven Architecture | Microservices | High-Availability Systems | Real-Time Data Pipelines

Observability & Reliability: CloudWatch (metrics, logs, traces) | Distributed Tracing | SLOs & Alerting | Instrumentation | Production Debugging | Cost & Performance Optimization

Containers & Infra: Docker | Kubernetes | ECS | Helm | Talos | Infrastructure as Code | CI/CD

Backend Engineering: Java (Spring Boot, Quarkus) | Python | Rust | REST & gRPC | PostgreSQL | Redis | DynamoDB | Concurrent Systems

AI & Agentic Systems: Agentic Architectures | LLM Application Patterns | Tree-sitter + LLM Tooling | Prompt & Tooling Engineering | Enterprise AI Adoption

Leadership: Technical Strategy | Cross-Team Architecture | Executive Communication | Mentorship | Customer Engagement

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

McGraw HillMCGRAW HILL | Remote

Engineering Manager, AI Product and Platform

Jan 2026 - Present

Lead product delivery teams within the AI Platform building AI-enabled education features, while shaping how the broader engineering organization adopts AI

  • Manage product delivery teams within the AI Platform building AI-enabled features in the education space, leveraging agentic architectures and shared platform services
  • Drive responsible AI development focused on measurable learner outcomes — trustworthy, safe, and grounded in proven pedagogy
  • Shape the enterprise rollout of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) — defining evaluation criteria, integration patterns, and the guardrails that let teams ship faster without compromising code quality or security
  • Partner with executive leadership to translate emerging AI capabilities into pragmatic engineering practice, representing the developer experience throughout

SonatypeSONATYPE | Remote

Principal Engineer, Platform Segment Lead

Dec 2021 - Jan 2026

Owned architecture and technical design for the distributed platform serving 15M+ developers across 2,000+ organizations

Distributed Systems & Data Processing

  • Architected and led technical design for cloud-native platform systems processing millions of open source component releases monthly across all major language ecosystems (npm, PyPI, Maven, NuGet, etc.)
  • Designed scalable data pipelines ingesting, inspecting, and analyzing OSS components in real-time using event-driven architecture (AWS EventBridge, Kinesis) with Java/Spring Boot microservices
  • Led technical design for usage-based billing metering — translating diverse product requirements into a unified, scalable solution serving multiple products within the platform suite
  • Led 0-to-1 R&D initiative designing and prototyping a breaking-changes analysis solution leveraging tree-sitter parsers and LLMs to detect API compatibility issues across software ecosystems

Reliability, Observability & Cost

  • Instrumented distributed AWS services end-to-end — CloudWatch metrics and logs, distributed traces, dashboards, and SLO-based alerting — keeping production systems debuggable and on-call sustainable
  • Drove scalability and reliability initiatives across the platform; debugged production incidents from traces and metrics rather than guesswork
  • Led cost optimization reducing AWS spend by $235K annually while preserving service performance

Cross-Team Technical Leadership

  • Drove architectural consensus across multiple product teams and senior leadership — translating diverse stakeholder needs into shared platform solutions that worked for every product in the suite
  • Collaborated closely with product managers on scoping, prioritization, and requirements gathering as technical owner of platform design
  • Engaged directly with customers on architecture discussions — understanding real-world constraints while focusing on a delightful developer experience
  • Mentored 3–5 person delivery teams on distributed systems patterns, cloud architecture, and technical delivery best practices
  • Created the Agentic Software Delivery methodology — a structured, multi-phase approach using orchestrated AI agents for parallel development and rapid prototyping

Technology Stack: Java (Spring Boot, Quarkus), Python, Rust, PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, AWS EventBridge, Kinesis, Lambda, ECS, Kubernetes, Docker, DataBricks

Product Manager

Apr 2018 - Nov 2020

Internal move from engineering to lead product strategy for the security innovation platform; returned to Principal Engineer afterward

  • Led 0-to-1 development of "Release Integrity" (now Malware Defense) — directing research, development, and launch of the first-to-market automated malicious component detection solution for software supply chains, now detecting thousands of new malicious packages quarterly
  • Translated customer requirements into scalable technical roadmaps, balancing user needs with architectural constraints in close partnership with engineering leadership

Senior Software Engineer

Sep 2016 - Oct 2018

Technical lead for Security Data group building Software Composition Analysis (SCA) distributed systems

  • Designed and scaled data pipelines processing millions of open source component releases monthly across all major ecosystems
  • Built distributed services powering the Nexus Intelligence platform using Java / Spring Boot, leveraging the world's largest software supply chain dataset
  • Implemented proprietary OSS component identification and automated vulnerability detection systems

CodecovCODECOV | Remote

Lead Product Manager

Nov 2020 - Nov 2021
  • Directed product strategy for code coverage analytics tools serving 30,000+ engineering teams — a developer-tooling product through and through
  • Collaborated with distributed engineering on cloud-native CI/CD integration architecture

Midas EducationMIDAS EDUCATION (Startup) | Remote

VP Engineering

Oct 2015 - Sep 2016
  • Led engineering organization building a 100% AWS-based SaaS educational platform
  • Architected cloud-native infrastructure and microservices for scalable content delivery

McGraw HillMCGRAW HILL | Columbus, OH

Senior Platform Engineer

Jul 2014 - Nov 2015
  • Built the Learning Event Analytics Platform on AWS — one of the first teams to adopt cloud-native, serverless solutions inside the org
  • Developed a distributed system ingesting and analyzing millions of learning events daily using AWS Lambda and event-driven architecture
  • Designed scalable data processing pipelines for real-time learning analytics

SEEN DIGITAL MEDIA, INC. (Startup) | Columbus, OH

Chief Technology Officer

Mar 2011 - Jan 2014
  • Directed all technical operations and strategy for an AWS-native SaaS platform from inception
  • Led engineering team development and cloud infrastructure architecture

EARLIER EXPERIENCE

Crown Partners — Senior Consultant (2010–2011)

CitationPoint Software (Startup) — Senior Software Engineer (2009–2010)

Beatport.com (Startup) — Software Developer (2008–2009)

Solve Interactive, Inc — Software Developer (2006–2007)

PC Upgraders, Inc — Web Solutions Division Manager (2002–2003): managed data center operations and web hosting infrastructure

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Languages:

  • Java — Expert (20+ years; Spring Boot, Quarkus, Hibernate, concurrency, Streams)
  • Python — Production use for tooling, automation, and ML/LLM integration
  • Rust — Actively adopting; production work at Sonatype and personal tooling
  • Go, Node.js / TypeScript — Comfortable; used across personal projects, internal tooling, and this site
  • SQL — Expert (PostgreSQL primarily)

Distributed Systems & Cloud:

  • AWS (15+ years) — EC2, ECS, Lambda, EventBridge, Kinesis, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, IAM
  • Event-Driven & Streaming: EventBridge, Kinesis, Kafka, message queues
  • APIs & Networking: REST, gRPC, HTTP optimization, distributed systems networking
  • Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch

Container Orchestration & Infrastructure:

  • Kubernetes: Production workload deployment at Sonatype; self-managed clusters (Talos, kubeadm, Helm) for homelab and consulting projects
  • Containers: Docker (deep production experience), AWS ECS (production owner)
  • Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD: CloudFormation, Terraform exposure, GitHub Actions, automated deployment pipelines

Observability & Reliability:

  • CloudWatch metrics & logs, distributed tracing, custom dashboards, SLO-based alerting, production incident debugging from telemetry
  • Comfortable defining instrumentation patterns and turning them into reusable building blocks

Unix / Linux & Fundamentals:

  • 20+ years of daily Unix/Linux use — shell, SSH, systemd, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, routing), VPNs (WireGuard, IPSec); run a multi-node homelab

AI / LLM Tooling:

  • Claude (Code & Desktop), OpenRouter, MCP server development, agentic architectures, prompt & tooling engineering, LLM-based static analysis (tree-sitter + LLMs)