Last updated: June 20, 2025
My name is Brandon Morrison, and I am not actively looking for work. However, I'm always open for interesting conversations about how to work well in technical spaces. Here's what I can bring.
đź‘Ą Technical Leadership / People Management: I've been on the management side of software development for about 7 years now officially, and acted as a technical leader in different settings for even longer.
This has involved several different hats, including internal coaching through 1:1s/trainings, product roadmap design, customer service, project management, and team buildout (hiring/firing/planning). I've done this largely in a remote environment, and can bring many different practices to your organization to improve your ability to effectively move work in hybrid or fully remote environments. In most cases, this has been for media/publishers, NGO's, federal clients, or hospitality groups. Job titles that might be appropriate are Engineering Director, Engineering Manager, VP of Engineering, or CTO.
đź’» Software Development/Architecture: I'm also a capable developer in my own right. I'm most comfortable with JavaScript and PHP, but have worked with most common frontend frameworks/languages (React, Vue, Typescript, Javascript), backend systems (PHP, Rails, Python, Node), databases (MySQL, Postgres, Mongo), and infrastructure/devops systems (AWS, Docker, Linux maintenance).
I'm most valuable as an architect/consultant who can take a look at legacy systems and the teams who maintain them to plan for how to move forward with them to better serve customer needs. This can either happen by continuing within those systems, migrating parts of them, or wholesale rebuilds/deprecations, depending on the situation. Job titles that might be appropriate are Staff Engineer or Principal Engineer.
👨‍💻 Technical Leadership: I've led software engineering teams of various sizes over the past 8 years, both as a people manager and as a technical lead. In this capacity, I've been a strong partner to product managers by validating the feasibility of feature ideas.
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Team Building Through equitable and humane hiring practices, I've grown teams from 1-2 engineers to 5-6. At my last job, my last three hires have all stayed at a tenure of at least 2 years and have contributed significantly to several larger organization priorities, including a successful redesign of one of the major brands and a build out of a design system to allow for refreshes for many of the other brands in the portfolio.
đź’» Individual Contributor: I've built several production systems for clients with significant impact, including high traffic news sites and publishing platforms for program management at scientific organizations. Specific areas of expertise are data visualizations, mapping applications, SMS messaging, and content management UX/UI. I primarily work with Javascript, HTML, and PHP, but am also fluent in Python and Ruby.
🔧 Entrepreneurial Engineer: In addition to working on larger teams, I have experience as a technical co-founder. I designed and developed a web application that allows home bakers to manage subscriptions and distribution of baked goods. The platform sends out automated SMS notifications to subscribers, and provides billing integrations for bakers. The Baking Notification Project has supported more than 100 bakers, connecting with more than a thousand subscribers who have received tens of thousands of baked goods.
I worked with Brandon during that fun time and he was the rare developer who reached across the metaphorical aisle. Our org made real progress in DevOps thanks to his clear-eyed empathy, relentless drive to solve problems by any means necessary, and ability to deliver deceptively simple, elegant solutions.
I’d always admired Brandon’s technical skills and knack for clear communication, but those experiences cemented my respect for him.
Designer, writer, and speaker. Started that “responsive web design” thing.
Worked together while at Vox Media.
I overlapped with Brandon only briefly, but he was such a highlight of my time at Vox Media. He was a calm, empathetic engineering leader, who was equally skilled at digging into tricky technical issues *and* complex organizational problems. Brandon was wonderful to work with, and I hope our professional paths cross again soon.
Brandon is a pleasure to work with, he's calm, smart and has a true I'll figure it out mentality that allows you to feel in safe hands because he actually will figure it out. While we worked together at Phase2 he was leading an innovation in our product space but often made himself available to the entire company when there were questions or even would jump.in when a fire was happening. A true selfless, technical leader was emerging then and many years later we have stayed in touch as friends and he has become thoughtful, empathetic and technical leader any organization would be lucky to have.
If you're interested in working together, please email me at brandon@brandonmorrison.com.