Keith Mazanec
Software Engineering Leader
Software engineering leader with 10+ years of experience building and scaling consumer and B2B platforms across e-commerce, digital publishing, SaaS, and regulated industries. Proven at modernizing legacy systems, improving reliability and performance, and driving meaningful business impact, including leading large-scale platform transformations and reducing infrastructure costs by 30%. Passionate about building high-performing engineering organizations, developing leaders, and guiding teams through change. Founder of an AI-native product and platform practice focused on accelerating modern software development through rapid iteration, customer feedback, and developer-first tooling.
Professional Experience
Founder & Principal Software Engineer
2025 - Present
- Founded an AI-native product and platform practice focused on accelerating modern software development
- Lead end-to-end product development across consumer, SaaS, and regulated industries
- Apply AI-assisted development and agentic workflows to increase delivery velocity
- Design scalable, API-first, event-driven architectures
- Build internal platforms and developer tooling to improve developer experience
- Partner with founders and business leaders on product strategy and technical execution
- Drive rapid experimentation and customer validation
Director of Software Engineering
Brad's Deals
2021 - 2025
- Led the engineering organization responsible for Brad's Deals' consumer platform and core business systems
- Owned platform strategy and roadmap, modernizing a legacy home-grown system to a MACH architecture
- Built and scaled a multi-disciplinary engineering organization (18 engineers) across frontend, backend, fullstack, mobile, DevOps, and QA, including building QA from scratch
- Established career paths, mentorship, and growth frameworks for engineers and emerging leaders
- Introduced AI-powered publishing workflows to improve content velocity and operational efficiency
- Led cloud modernization, reducing AWS spend by ~30% while improving reliability and observability
- Partnered with product and leadership on experimentation, platform evolution, and long-term strategy
- Established privacy, security, and compliance standards across the platform
Senior Engineering Manager
Brad's Deals
2019 - 2021
- Led multiple frontend and backend teams responsible for the core platform and B2B marketplace
- Built and launched a B2B marketplace platform enabling new revenue streams
- Integrated a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to support personalization and lifecycle marketing
- Modernized infrastructure with Docker-based development environments and ECS deployment
- Enhanced site performance through CDN migration, improving speed and reducing bandwidth costs
- Established incident response and on-call practices
- Rolled out A/B testing and experimentation platform to support data-driven decision-making
- Supported internship program and mentored junior engineers
Engineering Manager
Brad's Deals
2016 - 2019
- Led the backend engineering team responsible for the core platform and APIs
- Built backend services using Ruby on Rails and Go
- Designed and launched an event-driven content alerting system
- Led MySQL → PostgreSQL database migration
- Built CMS tooling and API backends for internal teams
- Orchestrated email service provider migration across the web stack
- Partnered with product, content, and marketing teams on platform initiatives
Software Engineer
Brad's Deals
2013 - 2016
Customer Relationship Manager
Nordstrom
2012 - 2013
Department Manager
Nordstrom
2011 - 2012
Personal Stylist
Nordstrom
2009 - 2011
Technology Specialist
OfficeMax
2003 - 2009
Core Competencies
Engineering Leadership & Strategy
- Organization design & scaling
- Technical strategy & roadmapping
- Team building & coaching
- Platform modernization
- Cross-functional leadership
- Operational excellence
Platform & Architecture
- Cloud-native & event-driven systems
- Microservices & distributed systems
- Multi-tenant SaaS architectures
- Platform engineering & tooling
- Reliability & observability
- Incident response
AI & Modern Development
- AI-assisted development workflows
- Agentic systems & LLM applications
- Rapid prototyping & validation
- Developer experience & productivity
- CI/CD & automated testing
Technologies
Languages & Frameworks
Cloud & Infrastructure
Data & Systems
Security & Compliance
Education
Dev Bootcamp
Web Development
2013
Vanderbilt University
Computer Science Studies
2004 - 2006