About Brandon
Owning delivery, reliability, and security across cloud, platform, and software engineering.
I'm Brandon, a self-taught engineer from Phoenix who learned by taking things apart and putting them back together. My path into tech didn't start in a classroom. It started on a hand-me-down PC in my bedroom running MS-DOS, playing Oregon Trail on 5.25" floppies and piecing together working machines out of whatever old hardware my family had lying around. Around 12, a neighbor who owned a software company gave me my first real project: build and host a blog on a Linux VM in AWS. I was hooked. By 14 I was building custom desktops for local customers out of my house. I never finished high school the traditional way, got my GED a year later just to prove I could, and went straight into the workforce. Nearly two decades later I'm a Sr. Software Development Engineer at Charles Schwab, having worked my way up from a contractor monitoring production systems at 18 to building cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, .NET APIs, and platform tooling across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
What I bring to the table is hard to put in a box. I've lived in the Linux terminal, written full-stack apps, built cloud data platforms on Kubernetes, integrated monitoring systems, and shipped everything in between. I'm most useful in environments where you need someone who can see across the whole stack and figure out how the pieces fit together. Not the deepest specialist in any one area, but that breadth is the point. A financial services environment like Schwab has zero tolerance for mistakes, and that's shaped how I think about building things: resilient, secure, and well-considered.
When I'm not at a keyboard, I'm usually in the garage. Restoring an old ATV for my kids to ride, maintaining and upgrading my motorcycles and dirt bikes, and generally enjoy tearing into anything with a motor to figure out what's wrong with it. There's something satisfying about mechanical problems compared to software ones. Things bolt off and back on the same way, which is a lot more straightforward at times. I do all my own vehicle maintenance and I'll fire up a power tool for yard work just to have something running. The same curiosity that got me into computers keeps me in the garage.
