Learn how a data science executive thinks about building scalable data systems at startups.
Brenden Grace
Product and growth success across a range of industries
A hands-on, revenue-focused engineering leader who has grown and scaled products and teams across a range of industries (Banking, Insurance, Advertising and Security). I've lead in the early stage, from 0-20M ARR, and have also navigated the tricky waters of growing technology from 50 to over a 100 headcount (>150M revenue).
I've architected and developed applications that can handle 100s of thousands of requests per second (RTB) and deployed applications around the globe that are powering critical banking and insurance applications.
You can find more information at f-cto.com/work-with-me
Work
External Data Augmented LLMs - Demyst
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTii1HKwuJwDemyst was interested in showcasing how their external data management platform could be used with LLM agents. I built some prototypes to demo for customers and created walk-through videos like this one.
Patent - Method and system for behavioral classification - Google Patents
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2010088238A1/enOne of two patents I was awarded for my work building an NLP-based contextualization system for advertising targeting purposes.
Experience
Rialtic
Chief Technology Officer
Nov 2021 - Aug 2023
Brought on to re-architect a prototype technology and help kickstart go-to-market. Resulted in adoption from a top-5 Insurer and a Series B growth round.
- Landed top-5 Insurer
- 30M Series B
Demystdata
CTO
Jan 2015 - Nov 2021
Developed their initial monolith into a globally distributed platform, running out of 5 AWS regions. Revenue grew from sub 1M ARR to 20M ARR supporting real-time banking and insurance applications from global firms like: Klarna, Farmers, ANZ, HSBC and Standard Chartered
- Raised Series A
- 0-20M ARR
Collective
VP of Engineering
Jan 2008 - Jan 2015
Rose from Principal Engineer to VP admist the success of scaling technology and teams handling hundreds of thousands of RPS at sub 100ms latencies. Crossed the rather tricky 50 -> 100 person tech team chasm effectively using time-bound team pods. Revenue grew from 30M to 185M a year during my tenure.
- Principal Engineer to Vice President
- 200 RPS at sub 80ms latency p95
- Machine learning powered campaigns targeting hundreds of millions of profiles
Related Blog Posts
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Fractional Focus: Building MVPs for startups with Sam Parks Learn how a top AI/ML software engineer thinks about MVPs from his own experience as an inventor, founder, advisor, and investor to startups.
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