Photo of Decker Brower

Decker Brower

Senior Software Engineer

I raise the floor wherever I go.

I build platforms teams can trust — by making high-impact systems reliable, observable, and safe to scale. I’ve spent my career in startups and scale-ups, shipping product while hardening the foundations underneath it.

Now

I’m currently working on ads and analytics platforms at scale, focused on correctness, observability, and decision-quality metrics leaders can actually trust. Long-term, I’m focused on Staff-level impact: owning problems end-to-end, raising the bar for teams, and building systems that last.

What I do

  • Trustworthy metrics: clarify semantics, prevent silent inflation, ship data quality checks.
  • Debuggable systems: tracing and dashboards that make “why is p95 spiking?” a five minute answer.
  • Execution at scale: patterns + guardrails that reduce surprises without slowing teams down.

Selected impact

  • Growth: shipped 4 new games to production, driving exponential monthly subscriber growth over the following 4 months.
  • Revenue: introduced Marquee Ads, driving a 900% surge in ad revenue; improved article ad placement to boost impressions by 70% and revenue by 37%.
  • Commerce: shipped BOGO deals, resulting in a 73% increase in AOV and a 6000% surge in order volume month-over-month for a partner.
  • Reliability: reduced speech-to-text failure rate by 99% by implementing a circuit breaker pattern across games.
  • Quality: drove a 94% reduction in sitewide accessibility errors and a 95% decrease in daily checkout errors.
  • Performance: cut daily reorder notification job runtime by 99.99%; reduced add-to-cart and product search latency by 43% and 50%.

Experience

Handshake — Senior Software Engineer (Jun 2025 – Present)

Working on ads and analytics platforms with a focus on correctness, observability, and decision-quality metrics.

  • Designing and operating analytics services where correctness and semantic clarity are first-class concerns.
  • Improving cache correctness and invalidation patterns to prevent silent data staleness and misleading metrics.
  • Partnering with data and product teams to ensure metrics are trusted inputs for decision-making, not just dashboards.
  • Strengthening observability (tracing, metrics, alerting) to reduce time-to-diagnosis and operational risk.
Volley — Senior Software Engineer (Jun 2024 – Jun 2025)

Built and shipped new voice-driven game features and platform improvements; focused on reliability and production correctness.

  • Shipped 4 new games driving rapid subscription growth.
  • Reduced speech-to-text failure rate by 99% via circuit breaker pattern.
  • Improved testing strategy to reach 90%+ test coverage on a team.
Leafly — Senior Software Engineer (Nov 2020 – Jan 2024)

Worked across ads + commerce systems with a bias toward measurable outcomes: revenue, conversion, performance, and quality.

  • Introduced BOGO deals (+73% AOV, +6000% MoM volume for a partner).
  • Introduced Marquee Ads (+900% ad revenue).
  • Boosted ad placement performance (+70% impressions, +37% revenue).
  • Enabled native iOS checkout flows (supported 40% of annual orders).
  • Reduced accessibility errors by 94% and daily checkout errors by 95%.
  • Improved performance: jobs (-99.99% runtime), search false negatives (-99.9%), latency (-43% / -50%).
FullStack Labs — Senior Software Engineer (May 2017 – Nov 2020)
  • Led a 30-person team building a high-complexity financial accounting system for Medicaid payment processing.
  • Spearheaded a 20-person team delivering nine custom B2B web apps in a year.
Earlier roles (2012 – 2017)
  • Built and shipped a multi-sided B2B/B2C SaaS platform in freight/logistics.
  • Shipped an Android/iOS WebView market research app.
  • Built bespoke CRM + portfolio management tools.

Skills & tools

I’m comfortable across product engineering and platform work: APIs, data systems, observability, and infrastructure.

Languages

JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Ruby, C#

Frameworks

React, Next.js, NestJS, Rails, FastAPI, Flask

Data

PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, MongoDB

Infra & Observability

Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform • Datadog, Sentry, Grafana, ELK

Protocols

HTTP, WebSockets, WebRTC, gRPC

Say hi

The fastest way to reach me is via LinkedIn DM.
The best way is an invitation for beer and tacos.