Mat Brown

I’m a full-stack software engineer with fourteen years’ experience working on consumer-facing applications, primarily on the web. I’ve built software to scale in traffic, data size, and product complexity. I’m most effective as a tech lead, splitting my time between writing code to tackle challenging technical problems, and supporting my colleagues in doing the same.

Lately I’ve been working with React and Redux in TypeScript. In the past, I’ve also worked with Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, AngularJS, Docker, Algolia, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, Riak, Erlang, MongoDB, jQuery, MySQL, Solr, Java, and PHP.

Recent Highlights

Dropbox

Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead

  • Designed and executed process to onboard team to an entirely new scope of feature ownership following a major company reorg. Led group of senior engineers that consolidated and deepened knowledge of technical architecture, technical and product health metrics, and on-call responsibilities, working off of sparse documentation and resources adopted from previous owning teams.
  • Led design and implementation of a major new release of the File Viewer SDK, a platform-agnostic TypeScript library for embedding file previews across a range of Dropbox product surfaces. Spearheaded the creation of the SDK’s Plugin API, which allows teams across Dropbox to add new functionality to the preview feature without needing any code to be changed in the SDK itself.
  • Implemented annotation functionality on the new desktop app preview feature, in the process resolving substantial technical ambiguity around how loosely-coupled ancillary features should interact with the preview content. This was a must-have for Dropbox’s 2019 company-wide “Gemini” release milestone.

Genius

Engineering Lead, Engineering Manager

  • Designed and implemented the annotation highlight anchoring algorithm for the Genius Web Annotator, clearing the major technical hurdle for Genius’s core vision of annotation across the web.
  • Took over full responsibility for Genius’s programmatic revenue stream for the year 2017, overhauling demand integrations and creating a system for detailed analysis of programmatic performance, resulting in total programmatic revenue for that year double our initial projections.

Work Experience

Dropbox

, Senior Software Engineer, March 2019–Present

Genius

, Engineering Lead, Engineering Manager, May 2013–December 2018

Brewster

, Software Engineer, July 2011–May 2013

Clique

, Technical Co-Founder, January 2011–June 2011

Patch

, Principal Software Engineer, April 2008–December 2010

Time Out New York

, Online Developer, February 2007–March 2008

YB Services

, Director of Web Development, September 2006–February 2007

Starbucks

, Enterprise Help Desk Analyst I, September 2005–August 2006

Open Source

Popcode

, HTML/CSS/JavaScript editor for students, July 2015–present

Cequel

, Ruby ORM backed by Cassandra, April 2012–September 2015

Sunspot

, Solr search library for Ruby, October 2008–August 2011

Extracurricular

Code Nation

, volunteer classroom instructor, September 2014–April 2018

Learning Apache Cassandra

, published February 2015

Education

Dartmouth College

, B.A. Cum Laude, Computer Science modified with Linguistics, 2005