Brian Duff
Distinguished Engineer

Technical leader with experience at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Oracle. Passionate about building amazing infrastructure and products.

cairndubh@gmail.com (415) 203-2888 https://duff.blog

Work Experience

Distinguished Engineer
LinkedIn
Oct 2023 – present Sunnyvale, CA

Leading an ambitious rearchitecture of LinkedIn's engineering systems. Modernizing our developer, deployment, and quality infrastructure, and embracing agent and skill driven AI to massively scale LinkedIn's engineers.

Principal Software Engineer
Google
Jun 2022 – Oct 2023 Sunnyvale, CA

Improved the developer experience for Google Cloud, the experience of using Git within Google, unified many of Google's backend systems around a common framework and tool chain to ensure a better developer experience, and secured the safety and compliance of Google's production release pipeline. Delivered prototypes and exploration around the use of AI in Google's internal developer experience.

Principal Software Engineer
Twitter
Mar 2021 – Jun 2022 San Francisco, CA

Technical architecture of the Engineering Effectiveness (EE) organization. Led 100+ engineers, product managers, data scientists, and researchers to accelerate the experience of a 3,000 person eng org.

  • Established key velocity indicators to measure progress against company level velocity objectives.
  • Modernized developer tools. Evaluated and implemented migrations for code review, CI / CD, build systems, version control, IDEs and observability.
  • Established developer experience as a product. Designed programs, frameworks and tools to collect and interpret developer sentiment through CABs, interviews, direct observation programs, and surveys. Helped multiple teams to align priorities and staffing with developer needs.

Principal Software Engineer
Facebook
Apr 2019 – Mar 2021 Menlo Park, CA

Defined and executed strategy for Developer Experience (DevXP), creating and supporting tools and frameworks used by thousands of engineers.

  • Established developer loop cycle time metric definitions across five distinct developer cohort types.
  • Overhauled and modernized Facebook's mobile app build and packaging tooling, working closely with counterparts at Google and Apple.
  • Spearheaded and delivered an initiative to move mobile development off laptops to remote cloud based infrastructure, doubling build speeds and reducing errors due to inconsistencies in Facebook's developer environment.

Senior Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead Manager
Google
Aug 2008 – Apr 2019 Mountain View, CA

Technical leadership and execution on Nearby, Google+, CloudSQL, and Engineering Tools.

Nearby

  • Co-founded and built the Nearby team from conception to launch of several frameworks and features. Hired, managed, mentored, and developed a large team of managers and engineers.
  • Launched connectivity APIs and product features for Android and iOS, including the Nearby Messages, Nearby Connections, Nearby Notifications, Fast Pair, and Chromecast Guest Mode. Initiated the Nearby Share product and incubated it through its early conception to internal beta.

Google+ Developer Infra

  • Built infrastructure to enable one of Google's largest Android and iOS apps to ship multiple releases. Significantly sped up network performance, and reduced application binary size. Established patterns, frameworks, and APIs that became core to multiple Google Android applications.

Cloud SQL

  • Part of the founding team through initial GA. Responsible for the external developer experience, and several features such as persistent backups.

EngTools

  • Improved productivity for thousands of IntelliJ users within Google by building IDE features for Python, Blaze, Protocol Buffers, and GWT. Built IDE integration support in Blaze (Bazel).
  • Built an internal web tool (Snippets) used by thousands of Google employees to write weekly status updates.

Consulting Member of Technical Staff
Oracle
Jun 1998 – Aug 2008 Redwood Shores, CA

Built external and internal developer tools as a technical lead in the Application Developer Tools division.

  • Architected and implemented the core tool platform framework, and designed a plugin and extensibility API enabling Oracle to ship the JDeveloper and SQL Developer products.
  • Led a (renegade) team to create a modularized, scalable build and CI system.
  • As an early Java adopter and technical expert, spoke at multiple Java tech conferences.

Education

B.Sc. Computer Science (Hons.)
University of St. Andrews
Oct 1994 – May 1998

Skills