
Brandon Sanders
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Architect and Developer
Manchester, VT, United States
Toptal member since September 27, 2024
Brandon is a software architect and leader who drives innovation in distributed computing and AI for teams worldwide. The systems they've architected support more than $2 billion in annual revenue, and their work in swarm robotics and Layer-0 blockchains has resulted in US patents, NSF funding, and university fellowships. Brandon is the founder and CEO of Alicorn Systems, a startup pushing the boundaries of tokenless blockchain technology to redefine software development.
Portfolio
Experience
- Public Speaking - 13 years
- Writing & Editing - 10 years
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) - 9 years
- Software Architecture - 9 years
- Distributed Systems - 8 years
- Blockchain - 7 years
- Rust - 4 years
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Rust, Distributed Systems, WebAssembly (Wasm), Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Java
The most amazing...
...work I've done is founding Alicorn Systems and creating Metablockchain, a patented, tokenless data platform that operates across web apps and robotic systems.
Work Experience
Founder and CEO
Alicorn Systems
- Created and patented the Metablockchain, enabling over 50,000 transactions per second (TPS) per node, operable on embedded devices, and offering near-linear scalability.
- Partnered with Google and FIRST Robotics to conduct an international test of the Alicorn platform with student robotics teams, achieving a 30 times reduction in the time required to create and deploy new control systems.
- Headed business outreach and product pitches, secured two university grants and one NSF grant, and enlisted six advisors from various industries, including SRI International and Microsoft leaders.
Staff Software Engineer
Wayfair
- Developed Wayfair's first Rust-based machine learning microservice, a "Search by Photo" service for sales agents, driving over $5 million per year in added customer conversions.
- Re-architected a legacy embedding search platform into a Rust-based, Google Cloud native system, saving $330,000 annually in cloud costs, reducing training lag by 80%, and increasing throughput by tenfold.
- Headed the Wayfair Rust platform team by developing Kubernetes and Docker platform libraries for all Wayfair Rust applications and conducting workshops for new Rust developers.
Senior Software Engineer
Wayfair
- Developed a globally deployed, low-latency (<10 ms) microservice for ML feature serving, saving $600,000 annually in cloud costs by eliminating client-side feature caches and reducing processing lag from approximately seven days to one day.
- Created and presented the "What's a Microservice?" workshop, which is now a mandatory part of the training program for all new Wayfair engineers.
- Delivered monthly talks on advanced engineering topics, including applying mechanical sympathy to everyday engineering challenges and designing scalable real-time distributed systems.
Senior Software Engineer
Wayfair
- Oversaw the architecture and development of a distributed ads streaming service, generating over $300,000 in new marketing channels and driving more than $1.5 billion in global annual revenue. Acted as a senior software engineer for data platforms.
- Joined the Wayfair Java Platform team, led the rollout of Spring Boot and Gradle across the organization, and provided critical operational support during the 2021 Log4Shell zero-day incident.
- Mentored engineers on the design, development, and deployment of generic distributed systems and microservices architectures built on Java, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Advising Software Engineer
Object Computing
- Worked on embedded and distributed systems and developed the 1st OpenDDS implementation for the ROS 2 robotics framework.
- Benchmarked and tested the 1st iteration of the Micronaut microservices framework against existing and emerging microservices frameworks.
- Developed a Compact-1 Java 8 IIoT platform, enabling standard JVM applications to run on resource-constrained IIoT devices using custom JNI bridges to access native hardware.
Swarm Robotics Research Fellow
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- Researched and developed a novel decentralized and distributed data structure for robot swarms, enabling "leaderless" robots to store, share, and retrieve data based on physical location and age.
- Created containerized development environments using Docker, allowing new lab members to compile and test robot code in minutes instead of hours.
- Collaborated with lab members to develop 2D AprilTag and 3D Vicon motion tracking and capture systems for localizing physical robots within a virtual testing arena.
Lead Software Engineer
SuprTEK
- Headed the creation of an enterprise cloud service validation platform for the US Air Mobility Command, increasing pre-production test service uptime from approximately 10% to 99% and reducing manual validation work by 60%.
- Collaborated within the United States Air Force (USAF)'s first Agile engineering team, working with MITRE and USAF leadership to transform waterfall-based project plans into Agile user stories and project plans.
- Presented and demonstrated internal tooling bi-monthly to the USAF and MITRE leadership.
Experience
Wayfair AI: Similar Products Platform
Upon launching, this service drove over $5,000,000 per year in new customer conversions by enabling our sales agents to rapidly identify products similar to customer-provided imagery. It also saved over $330,000 in annual cloud costs from legacy search systems and attained 10x+ throughput gains over legacy search systems.
I was the staff software engineer and architect for this platform. I led the initial architecture and foundations for the different microservices and built a novel framework that enabled us to serve models from any framework (TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX, etc.) from the same web service with per-inference latencies that outperformed typical TensorFlow Serving solutions. Additionally, I built a novel framework that enabled Rust microservices to invoke data scientists' original Python pre-processing logic with minimal overhead, enabling our ML engineers to develop safe and performant Rust systems and our scientists to use the latest Python AI/ML frameworks.
Wayfair AdTech: Product Feeds Platform
Upon delivery, this platform generated over $300,000 in net new revenue by providing more advanced product feed customization tools for marketing partners and now drives more than $1.5 billion in global attributable revenue.
I was a senior software engineer and architect for this platform, leading the design and implementation of the event-driven distributed data architecture, applying my background in mechanical sympathy to realize 10x+ latency and throughput improvements compared to the legacy feeds platform, and implementing distributed tracing so we could track the lifecycle of a product from its first moments in the catalog to its final ad listing with a vendor.
Wayfair AI: ML Feature Store
Upon deployment, this service reduced annual cloud storage costs by $600,000 and reduced the lag between creating features and being servable from seven days to one day.
I was the senior engineer on this microservice, leading its design, development, delivery, and operations. I built the service with a mixture of Java, non-blocking IO, and the LMAX Disruptor framework, enabling the service to maintain low per-request latencies for web clients while elastically scaling to handle bursts of high-throughput requests to support offline batch processing jobs. The service is backed by an Aerospike cache, which is rewarmed with the latest daily features from a wide range of internal feature storage systems.
GPT for Rust
https://gitlab.com/caer/gptGPTyria | Nearest Neighbors' Search with GPT for Rust
https://www.caer.cc/logs/makers-guide-to-ai/Education
Bachelor's Degree in Writing and Rhetoric
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) - Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Systems Design and Architectural Innovation
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) - Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Google Ads API, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Node.js, LMAX-Exchange Disruptor, Facebook API
Tools
Logging, Apache Beam, Observability Tools, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google AI Platform, Terraform, Grafana, Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX)
Languages
Rust, Java, Python, JavaScript, HTML, HTML5, Embedded C, C, SQL, Dart, CSS, TypeScript, Ruby, MicroPython
Paradigms
Microservices, Agile, Agile Project Management, DevOps, Mobile Development
Platforms
Blockchain, Apache Kafka, Docker, Unix, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Embedded Linux, Arduino, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Apache Flink, Azure
Storage
NoSQL, Database Architecture, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Datadog, Aerospike, BigTable
Frameworks
Spark, Spring Boot, Bootstrap, Micronaut, Flutter
Other
Distributed Systems, Innovation, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Robotics, Technical Writing, Writing & Editing, Public Speaking, Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Decentralized Systems, Research, Embedding Models, Software Architecture, API Design, Back-end, Metrics, Architecture, Software Design, Full-stack, Technical Requirements, Infrastructure, API Integration, APIs, Integration, Responsive Design, System Architecture, Back-end Development, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), CI/CD Pipelines, Entrepreneurship, Design, 2D Graphics, Digital Graphics, Embedded Rust, Embedded Java, Patents, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Springbot, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), K-nearest Neighbors (KNN), Vector Databases, WebAssembly (Wasm), Technical Leadership, Leadership, Parquet, Crypto, CTO, Reporting, Front-end, Embedded Systems, Electronics, Front-end Development, Google BigQuery, Embedded Software, Embedded Hardware, Firmware, ESP32, Hardware, Genetics, Content Writing, Cloud Architecture, Operations, Distributed Tracing, Image Classification, FAISS, Game Development, Web Development, Electrical Engineering, Electromechanical Engineering, Art
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring