# Brian H. > Building Forge Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/brianh1 ## Work Experience ### Founding Engineer @ Forge Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ### Software Engineer @ Tecton Jan 2020 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco, California, United States Tech Lead: Embeddings + LLMs Tecton is a data platform for AI, used by Block, Coinbase, State Farm, Progressive insurance, and many others. Over 4.5 years, I led multiple foundational initiatives that shaped Tecton's infrastructure platform as we grew from Series A to Series C with an $XX million run rate. Tecton was recently acquired by Databricks. * Led Tecton's Generative AI strategy, developing key capabilities including RAG and Agentic retrieval systems that became central features in Tecton 1.0 * Led technical design and implementation of critical infrastructure improvements including Online Store Compaction (saving customers millions in storage costs) and Advanced Aggregation features, working across batch, realtime, and streaming data infrastructure. * On the weekly oncall pager for all 4.5 years, responding/supporting incidents 24x7x365 for tier-0 production infrastructure at 99.99% availability across 1M+ QPS * Architected QueryTree, a query building system that became the foundation for improved query performance across multiple compute engines and enabled new aggregation patterns. Transformed a challenging technical area into one with active contributions from 10+ engineers across teams. * Designed a Local Integration Testing infrastructure, accelerating developer iteration loop by many hours and significantly improving quality assurance across the platform Member of the core technical leadership group at Tecton: "Tecton Architecture Group". ### Software Engineer, Systems @ Determined AI Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 Distributed Systems Engineer working at the intersection of ML and systems. Main focus was building data parallel distributed training for Determined's AI training platform (with Horovod). I also helped maintain: * hyper parameter optimization system built around ASHA/Hyperband * cluster resource orchestrator + workflow execution (custom in Go) * framework support for PyTorch, Tensorflow, and Keras Blog post on some of my work (published after I had left): https://www.determined.ai/blog/optimizing-horovod . Seed investment by Amplify Partners, and Series A investment by GV; Company was acquired by HP: https://venturebeat.com/business/hpe-acquires-determined-ai-to-bolster-its-high-performance-compute-business/ ### Software Engineering Intern @ Lyft Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area (kinda the face of Lyft's IPO, check the article picture!) Team: Machine Learning Platform Team Project: Generate real-time statistics, dashboards, and alerts on the values being read and written Lyft's internal feature service (daily peak volume of > 1 million reads/writes per minute and tier-0 [maximal availability]). Using kinesis streams for event streams, flink for computation, wavefront for metric outputs. Also connecting the kinesis streams to Druid + Superset for customer teams to be able to slice and dice their data. I owned this project fully end-to-end: project scoping, customer team interviewing, technical design (needed sign-on from two external teams), implementation, and customer team onboarding. I also took on smaller side projects to help out the ML Platform Team: better rate limiting of feature service and support for multiple clusters for our k8s watchers for LyftLearn (Lyft's machine learning training platform). ### External Affairs @ Machine Learning at Berkeley Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Machine Learning at Berkeley is a student group at UC Berkeley focused on ML/AI. At the time, we had ~100 students that were members. I held various roles in the industry relations / external affairs space, including VP of External Affairs. I started a partnership program with industry, and created the first ML/AI Career Fair at UC Berkeley. We had over 20 companies attending, and over 400 students. Notable companies participating included Lyft, NVIDIA, Nuro, and Flexport. ### SDE Intern @ Amazon Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Greater Seattle Area "Seattle is beautiful in the summer" - literally everyone (helped Amazon get money back from non-payers -- may or may not have had a hand in them reaching their sky high stock price) Team: Prime Wardrobe Project: My team handled the back-end services for the post-checkout experience of Prime Wardrobe. Prime Wardrobe is a Prime benefit launched in June 2018 which is a way to shop for and try on clothing at home before purchasing them. I worked with three external teams to make modifications to three different Tier-1 back-end services (maximal availability) that are core components of Amazon’s ordering and payment systems to build a new use case for payment recovery. I owned both the technical design and implementation. ### Software Engineering Intern @ ZapLabs Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Emeryville, California learned a crazy amount of things Team: Mobile App Engineering (Android) Work: I was working as a traditional member of the team, rather than having specific intern projects. In the summer, I worked on various projects to improve the consumer Android home search app for Realogy brands (Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Better Homes & Gardens, ERA, and ZipRealty) During the Fall, I worked with the team to develop a new native business CRM app based on their existing Zap CRM platform, launched December 2017. ### Intern, Fuller Lab, Chemical Engineering Department @ Stanford University Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Stanford I had no idea what I was doing (I was still in high school) -- ended up building a cool algorithm that helped in some papers ## Education ### Bachelor of Science - BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/brian--hart --- Source: https://flows.cv/brianh1 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/brianh1/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05