Mark Brown

Work Experience

• Gold Country Robotics, Robotics Engineer

  Auburn, CA May 2024 – Present

  • Built autonomous ground robots using ROS 2 for agricultural, inspection, and wildfire mitigation applications
  • Engineered high-precision RTK GPS systems with u-blox F9P modules, correction radios, and custom PCB integration
  • Designed and fabricated CNC routers, robot enclosures, and control panels using CAD, 3D printing, and 8020
  • Developed modular PCBs for power delivery, signal routing, and sensor integration across platforms
  • Built full-stack control systems with ROS 2 nodes, FastAPI for real-time control/configuration, and WebSocket telemetry
  • Created remote-activated rooftop wildfire sprinkler systems with environmental sensors and safety interlocks
  • Prototyped and field-tested rugged robots and systems for real-world conditions in harsh outdoor environments

• Summit Technology Consulting Group / Lenders Cooperative, Senior Application Developer

  Mechanicsburg, PA March 2022 - May 2024

  • Built flagship loan origination software using hybrid Vue/Django,Postgres/k8s. Currently in use by 17 banks.
  • Built the SBA's disaster lending platform. Responsible for developing the payment processing application, Pay.gov integration, Disaster declarations and amendment processes, and DocuSign integration
  • Built the SBA's Oauth provider used across the disaster lending platform and VetCert
  • Engaged in discussions about UX/system design/architecture to enhance user satisfaction and understand user needs underlying proposed projects.
  • Quickly prototyped new ideas for disaster lending platform, contributing to enhanced functionality and user experience.
  • Built backup orchestration application for a bank's disaster recovery plan using Terraform/Node.js

• Bright Productions, Chief Technology Officer

  Petaluma, CA 2020-March 2022

  • Architected high-availability and mission-critical systems with DNS failover, multi-region deployments configured with connection peering, static assets served via CDN, observability dashboards, and A/B testing with over 15k monthly users.
  • Designed and built web applications using Vue & React, Node.js(Express/Koa2/Hapi), MariaDB/Postgres/MongoDB and ElasticSearch with fault-tolerant & distributed features on AWS, Linode, and Digital Ocean.
  • Established engineering practices around instrumentation and telemetry, CI/CD, headless puppeteer tests, and coding/commit standards which improved code quality, reduced costs and promoted consistency between projects.
  • Advanced forward-thinking culture of organization by creating one of the first sites on the internet to use an OpenType SVG multicolor font as a H1 tag logo which moved the site from #4 to #1 on google.
  • Identified sources of latency with tooling using numpy/pandas and developed solutions which improved Lighthouse scores/page speed rank by an average of over 25 points.
  • Refactored codebases in javascript, python, and php which modernized application code, improved security, increased execution speed, and reduced dependencies.

• Bright Productions, Team Lead & Senior Engineer

  Petaluma, CA2018-2020

  • Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines which tested code & triggered build processes segmented to dev/staging/production environments which eliminated deployment errors.
  • Led a team of 4 developers in creating APIs in Node.js (express, hapi, and koa2) and PHP(laravel, cake), building schemas for SQL and NoSQL databases in MySQL/MariaDB, Postgres, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and creating front-end experiences using Angular, Vue, React, JQuery, vanilla JavaScript, HTML/SCSS and Python.
  • Managed a fleet of 36 separate virtual machines with uptime > 99.9% in various flavors of linux on AWS, Linode, and Digital Ocean.
  • Managed company intranet and on-premise servers. Installed, configured, and maintained routers, switches, cabling, phone systems, local NPM server, VPN server and local test web servers.
  • Migrated user accounts, software packages, databases, configurations, and services from OSes approaching EOL to current LTS versions with zero downtime.
  • Continuously improved existing systems to increase service levels by expanding DevOps Program to include daily ClamAV scans with notifications and creating middleware to update password hashes in database from bcrypt v3 to v5 on successful login so that a legacy application could be updated to current node LTS version and utilize Error Codes.
  • Created troubleshooting tools in python, bash, and observability dashboards that increased efficiency and gave insight into server load and latencies. Discovered opportunities where adjustment of configuration improved IOPS.

• Bright Productions, Junior Developer

  Petaluma, CA2017-2018

  • Created and maintained websites in PHP, HTML, Javascript, CSS/SASS.
  • Started DevOps program which included system and application observability platform based upon collectd, redis, grafana and prometheus. fail2ban, and daily backups to s3.
  • Created tools in bash and python to aid client onboarding, billing and payroll, manage filesystems, apply updates/upgrades and aggregate/parse log files.
  • Found critical vulnerabilities in legacy PHP framework and patched code to remove vulnerabilities.

Education

• BA Political Science

  University of Iowa2009