Brian Feister Party Wizard 🧙
Architect, Front-End
Engineering & Design Leader

Overview

As Software Engineering Leader & Principal Architect specializing in UI/UX, Design Systems, and scalable front-end platforms, Brian has scaled platforms handling trillions of requests while maintaining his foundation as both a designer and engineer. He is also an active community leader and developer advocate who mentors both engineering and design leaders among customer organizations. He has served as a technical advisor solving the most challenging problems for eCommerce customers with a combined market cap exceeding $64B (including Nintendo.com/jp, Carters.com, Loewe.com, and Elfbeauty.com) where he has been among an inner circle of 10 Architects guiding critical technical decisions across an organization of 700+ engineers.

Brian has built and scaled multiple platforms from zero to one and from one to a hundred, delivering measurable business impact: achieving 200% velocity improvements, driving 350% product adoption growth, and architecting infrastructure optimizations that reduced costs by 99% ($2,700 to $30). As a Product Engineering Leader, he has mentored 100+ engineers across a range of experience levels, with many earning promotions. Brian serves as a primary advisor to VP+ leadership on roadmap strategy for platforms hosting the world's highest traffic websites.

His focus spans strategy, architectural problem-solving, user experience, high impact business advantages, and business acumen. He excels at unblocking teams across personality, process, and technical implementation. Passionate about reducing friction in software development, Brian leads with empathy, while delivering maintainability, scalability, process optimization, and automation to enable teams to deliver big impact.

Frameworks, Languages, Technologies

Typescript, Golang, Vector DBs (Weaviate, Marqo), React (1 - 19), AWS (Lambda, Route53, Cloudfront, Dynamo), Node.js, Edge Runtimes, GraphQL, Postgres, NATS (distributed message queue), MongoDB, Angular, PHP, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, Shell, Git, Apache, WordPress, Magento, and Backbone

Name: Brian Feister
Job Title: Architect, Front-End Engineering & Design Leader
Dribbble: brianfeister
Twitter: @brianfeister
Github: brianfeister
E-mail: brian.feister@gmail.com
Phone: 302.562.0308
Address: Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA)

Skills

Experience

Engineering Lead - Composable Commerce
(Lead Member of Technical Staff, Software Engineering)

Salesforce // October 2022 - Present

• Primary internal Salesforce Architect & advisor in a group of 700 engineers, and mentor for customers solving the hardest scalability challenges for development teams of over 10 of the largest retail companies in the world with a combined market cap over $64B: Nintendo.com/jp ($12B), Marmot.com ($2.6B), Elfbeauty.com ($7.4B), Saksoff5th.com ($2.6B), Bulgari.com ($6.5B), Loewe.com ($20.1B), Aritzia.com ($7B), Vineyardvines.com ($1B), Carters.com ($1B), Columbia.com ($3.1B)
• Prevented approximately $5B in customer attrition by automating a dynamic agentic tool capable of AI-powered and human un-assisted migration of 15 year old projects built with SFRA (Java + Twitter Bootstrap + jQuery framework) to modern React 19 + React Router 7 + Tailwind + Shadcn framework
• Led optimization that dropped server response times from 800ms → 200ms for $5B customer doing 3,000 orders / min
• One of approximately 10 Architects involved in most of the hardest technical decisions for an organization of over 700 engineers for Salesforce, named Leader in 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce (beating Shopify)
• Primary Lead for two featured Dreamforce Keynotes (2023 Gen AI pioneering functionality + from-zero platform rewrite)
• Guided team through growth phase, significantly improving agile metrics, with a peak velocity increase of 200% given no change in team or headcount
• Featured on Salesforce Commerce Cloud industry podcast as an industry expert
• Mentored 50 engineers ranging from 0 - 20 years of engineering experience, many of whom were promoted
• Worked closely with an expanding customer base and mentored their engineers, guiding both internal and external engineering team through a 350% product adoption increase over a 12 month window
• Primary advisor for VP+ roadmap, making key decisions for a developer experience platform serving trillions of requests, built on AWS Lambda in direct competition with Vercel, Netlify, Shopify, and other key Commerce industry infrastructure providers

CTO / CEO

Meet Near Me // November 2023 - Present

• Founder of event platform with a focus on unsupervised (after initial human-in-the-loop) data scraping / ingestion into vector db, primary Architect for frontend + backend (Golang, Weaviate, Postgres, NATS, Alpine.js, HTMX)
• Platform grossed $17K within 3 months of initial availability, fully bootstrapped
• Managed a fluctuating team of up to 15 contributors (mostly engineers) as a side project while leading a large Salesforce team
• Architected AWS exit and re-platformed to simplified Kubernetes-like distributed infrastructure built on Hetzner dedicated servers ($2,700/30TB ⇒ $30/30TB), leveraging native infra to replace overpriced AWS solutions: message queuing (NATS), text2vec-transformers vectorizing service, database (Weaviate and Postgres), Golang API Gateway, Alpine.js, and HTMX

Lead Member of Technical Staff, Software Engineering

Salesforce // Feb 2019 - October 2022

• UI Leader for two Salesforce products Elevate and Philanthropy Cloud
• Led Design Systems, built Storybook tooling to automate UX ingestion / usage of most current components & auto sync
• Mentored other engineers in UI best practices in a Typescript / React / Redux / Apollo / GraphQL ecosystem

Senior JavaScript / UI / UX Architect
(UI Lead)

Scala Inc. // Aug 2014 - Nov 2018

• Employee #2 (Founding UI Architect on a team of 15) responsible for founding an ambitious digital experience platform that featured physical-world connections via IoT sensors for pressure, temperature, and image recognition, a high throughput CMS (built on JCR / Apache's Jackrabbit Oak) for serving video and bundled web apps, and an API for managing synchronized digital playback across interconnected applications and devices.
• Founding leader that led hiring efforts in staffing the team from 2 up to 15, hired & managed Design Team
• Led UI / UX Architecture efforts as the team evolved and hired / managed specialists in those areas as the team grew
• Owned roadmap vision for internal and external stakeholders in establishing product direction regarding UI / UX

JavaScript / Front-End Engineer
(Technical / Project Lead)

Think Company // May 2013 - Aug 2014

• Brought onto multiple projects as an external consultant, earned trust and respect among the team via empathy and thought leadership, and ultimately became founding / interim team lead on each project contributed to
• Worked closely with multi-disciplinary stakeholders including internal UI / UX, external product management, and engineering management to keep projects highly aligned and on-target for delivery

Principal Developer & Designer

DreamStar Studios // 2007 - 2017

• Built over 40 web projects from the ground up with various open-source CMS platforms including WordPress, Magento, etc.
• Deeply invested in UI / UX, close to customers, building logo, brand identity, design, and customized CMS admin experiences