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Bryan Focht
Engineering Executive · GoDaddy · linkedin.com/in/bfocht
- 28+ years Engineering & Leadership
- $5B+ Driving billion dollar global growth
- $1.4M AWS budget
- MBA Boston University
Engineering executive with 28 years building enterprise software, currently owning technology strategy and P&L for the platform behind GoDaddy's commerce stack - the systems that decide what can be sold, at what price, in which market, and how it reaches a cart.
A consistent pattern across roles: taking on more organizational, financial and cross-functional scope at each step - from individual technical ownership to running global, multi-region engineering teams with budget authority over infrastructure spend, vendor and contractor investment, and capital planning - while staying accountable for the business outcome, not just the delivery. Currently leading the organization through an AI and agentic transformation - shipping software faster with AI-assisted engineering and building AI capabilities into the platform itself.
How I work
- Buy down risk before scale. De-risk large-scale enterprise migrations by pioneering a framework of translation seams, shadow-mode validation, and granular feature switches; eliminate systemic deployment risks and ensure zero-downtime business continuity.
- Fix causes, not symptoms. Enforce strict architectural governance by prioritizing root-cause remediation over tactical patches; structurally resolve defects at the source to eliminate technical debt across dependent systems.
- Grow people into scope. Scale organizational capacity through proactive talent cultivation; empower engineering managers and staff engineers with complete delivery ownership while maximizing executive leverage via architectural governance, strategic staffing, and systemic unblocking.
Currently accountable for
Directly spearheading the enterprise-wide modernization of core commerce infrastructure and its migration to AWS, with direct accountability for global engineering standards, platform resilience, and enterprise security/compliance. Expanding executive scope now spans automated revenue recovery and refund systems, plus emerging AI-driven monetization strategy.
AI & Agentic tools
Claude Code · Cursor · Codex · Copilot · OpenClaw · LiteLLM
Core technology
AWS · Kubernetes · Elastic/Grafana · Cloudwatch/trail
Skills: Engineering Leadership · Global Team Management · Roadmap & Product Strategy · E-commerce Platforms · Catalog & Pricing Systems · AWS · LLM Agents · Forward-Deployed Engineering
Director of Engineering
- $2B+ M&A platform integration
- 10M+ Monthly orders & renewals
- 3 Global AWS regions
I own the catalog, product-creation and basket platform behind GoDaddy's commerce stack. Three teams, roughly 25 engineers and managers from staff level to SDE I plus interns, deliberately spread globally for near-continuous delivery.
Selected impact
- Driving AI adoption across the org - an intern-built agent replaced a manual SOX tax-review process for a 10x productivity gain; shipped AI infrastructure other teams now build on (Catalog MCP server, Product Creation Agent and workflow orchestration).
- Achieved cost savings integrating GoDaddy's $1.8 Billion Host Europe Group acquisition onto a single platform - shut down several costly e-commerce platforms, rebranding five HEG brands into GoDaddy while one kept its standalone identity.
- Unlocked a new revenue stream from the $325M Poynt payments acquisition by integrating it directly into the catalog and ordering system, launching the product to GoDaddy's storefront.
- Invested in observability and AIOps alerting to catch defects before they compound: caught a pricing bug projected to hit 10% of monthly orders and a cart bug with ~$1M exposure, driving both fixes into the owning services rather than patching downstream.
- Treated operational reliability of tier-0 services as non-negotiable: root-caused a live catalog outage same-day and fixed the call path so a single slow dependency can't take the platform down.
Platform ownership
- Own the catalog, product-creation and basket platform - the merchandising and offer engine behind GoDaddy's storefront - designed around a variant/offer model behind a translation seam so every SKU (domains, hosting, email, add-ons, payments, and the emerging AI Credit reserve) prices consistently without breaking existing callers.
- Led the commerce-stack migration, moving order and basket traffic onto AWS in shadow mode and cutting over only once diffs were clean (99.6% match), protecting revenue-critical checkout through a high-risk migration.
- Set the resilience standard with circuit breakers, bounded caches, connection-pool isolation, and AI-driven anomaly detection, so one slow dependency can't cascade into an outage at 10M+ monthly orders; raised coverage requirements to 90% unit / 100% functional-API.
- Built and grew three globally distributed teams, and own the AWS and AI infrastructure budget worldwide, full-cycle recruiting, and contractor/vendor management, flexing in contractors for capacity when needed (EPAM, Tech Systems, Globant, Apex Systems, Lviv IT).
- Own security and compliance, spanning vulnerability remediation, certificate automation, attestation management, and SOX review tooling.
Technology
Java 21 · Spring Boot 3.x · SQL Server · DynamoDB · Redis · Github Workflows
Skills: Engineering Leadership · Global Team Management · Roadmap & Product Strategy · Mentorship & Career Growth · Partner & Vendor Management · Contractor & Staffing Management · Budget & Financial Management · Full-cycle Recruiting · Architecture Review · Agile / Scrum · Test Strategy & Coverage · SOX / Compliance · Java · Spring Boot · AWS · Microservices · REST APIs · SQL · SQL Server · DynamoDB · Redis · Caching Strategy · Observability · Resilience Engineering · Large-scale Migration · Catalog & Pricing Systems · E-commerce Platforms · LLM Agents · MCP · Prompt Engineering · AIOps Alerting
Senior Engineering Manager
- 50+ Markets launched
- $126M+ Revenue, 129% growth
- 4+ Major partners onboarded
Bootstrapped a cross-functional agile team - software engineers, test engineers, product owner, and marketing professional. Drove the roadmap in partnership with business development. Responsible for hiring, delivery and platform direction.
Ran full-cycle recruiting for the team - budgeting, sourcing, screening, interview loops and closing
Growth and reach
- Grew the private label reseller program from $55M to $126M in annual revenue under my leadership.
- Expanded the private label reseller program into 50+ global markets, adding localization to the platform: multi-language, multi-currency and multi-brand support.
- Launched a brand-new internationalized, responsive turnkey storefront on Node.js, React, and Bootstrap.
- Onboarded recognizable partners onto the platform, including WHMCS, Microsoft, and Amazon.
- Consistently delivered roadmap commitments on time.
Platform and engineering
- Redesigned and launched a new markup-based pricing platform, replacing a rigid legacy pricing system - cutting cost and complexity while letting the platform scale past 25,000 resellers with no added cost to the platform or storage.
- Partnered directly with Google to build a secure OAuth flow allowing Google Apps and Gmail customers to link a GoDaddy-purchased domain (.NET and C#). Helped author the Domain Connect whitepaper.
- Built a RESTful e-commerce API for partners building their own ecommerce stores, fully documented with OpenAPI so any platform can integrate.
- Authored the companion WordPress ecommerce plugin and storefront theme.
- Rapidly accelerated the pace of delivery and reduced the time to market for new features by fully automated CI/CD with Jenkins, building Docker images, and deploying to Kubernetes, including automated change-order creation for new releases.
- Held 97% unit test coverage plus integration tests across all core features.
- Lead engineer on the Web Pro platform (Django/Python), launching the first send-cart, shared-shopping, and customer delegation experience. Added integration for WebPro Marketplace matching website builders with customers.
Customer growth
Started a YouTube channel, Discord Server, and Twitter account to improve onboarding for new customers to the reseller program. Worked well enough that I expanded the team to include a marketing professional, hosting monthly livestreams and social content. We held monthly webinars where engineers can demo directly to customers.
ITIL certified since 2012.
Skills: Engineering Leadership · Hiring & Team Building · Roadmap & Product Strategy · Partner & Vendor Management · Contractor & Staffing Management · Full-cycle Recruiting · Global Team Management · Agile / Scrum · ITIL · Test Strategy & Coverage · Internationalization · Node.js · React · JavaScript · Python · Django · WordPress · REST APIs · Swagger / OpenAPI · Jenkins · Docker · Kubernetes · CI/CD · OAuth · Identity · .NET · C# · E-commerce Platforms · Microservices
Senior Technical Consultant
- 10 yr Consulting tenure
- ETL System Integration & Data Migration
- FDE Forward-Deployed Engineer
Software and data consulting - System Integration & Data Migration and .NET development, working as a forward-deployed engineer embedded directly at client sites.
- Worked with 150+ clients, from Fortune 500s to small businesses, designing solutions around their specific constraints rather than a standard package.
- Streamlined client processes and data flow to improve operating efficiency.
Skills: Forward-Deployed Engineering · ETL · .NET · C# · ASP.NET · SQL Server · SQL · Partner & Vendor Management
Software Engineering Manager
- 4 Direct reports
- Modernization AS/400 COBOL to .NET and SQL Server
- Payments & Fraud High Volume & Velocity Fraud Elimination
Managed a team of 4 engineers building financial-systems applications on C# and J2EE, batch-processing new-account inquiries to eliminate fraud through velocity checks, identity verification, and KYC/OFAC screening.
Directed the design and build of a real-time (sub-millisecond) payments scoring service on C++, delivering transaction inquiry for high-volume payments processing.
Automated nightly failover of the scoring service, rebuilding in-memory scoring models from scratch on each cutover for consistent fraud scoring without manual intervention.
Led a system migration off AS/400 mainframe (COBOL) to .NET and SQL Server with zero data loss, using ASP.NET, C# and SSIS. Also served as ScrumMaster.
Skills: Engineering Leadership · Hiring & Team Building · C# · J2EE · .NET · ASP.NET · SQL Server · SSIS · COBOL · SQL · Payments & Fraud · Agile / Scrum · ETL
Software Engineer
- 7 yr Career growth to Sr Engineer
- C++/SQL System Integration
Built ETL processes converting legacy-system data into SQL databases for CRM, scheduling and invoicing software in the services industry.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to optimize software performance and improve the user experience, reducing integration cost and streamlining new client onboarding.
Skills: ETL · SQL · SQL Server
Education & Certifications
- 3 Professional Certifications
- 2 AI / prompt engineering
- 3 University Degrees
Professional certifications
- Certified ScrumMaster - Scrum Alliance, May 2011
- ITIL version 3 - EXIN, Mar 2012
- CSSLP, Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional - (ISC)², Aug 2013 (lapsed Jul 2020)
AI & prompt engineering
- Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT - Vanderbilt University, Dec 2023
- Prompt Engineering: How to Talk to the AIs - LinkedIn, Feb 2024
Leadership
- Step Up to Leadership - Dale Carnegie Training
Organizations
- Node.js Foundation, Linux Foundation - since Jan 2017
Skills: Agile / Scrum · ITIL · Prompt Engineering · SOX / Compliance
Degrees
- Master of Business Administration
- Engineering coursework
- BS, Information Technology
- Associate of Arts
Skills
Leadership
Engineering Leadership · Global Team Management · Hiring & Team Building · Contractor & Staffing Management · Budget & Financial Management · Full-cycle Recruiting · Roadmap & Product Strategy · Partner & Vendor Management · Forward-Deployed Engineering · Mentorship & Career Growth
Practices
Agile / Scrum · ITIL · Architecture Review · SOX / Compliance · Test Strategy & Coverage
Languages
Java · C# · .NET · Python · JavaScript · COBOL · SQL
Backend & Cloud
Spring Boot · AWS · REST APIs · Microservices · J2EE · ASP.NET · Django · OAuth · Identity · Swagger / OpenAPI
DevOps
Kubernetes · Docker · Jenkins · CI/CD · Observability
Data
ETL · SQL Server · DynamoDB · Redis · SSIS · Caching Strategy
Frontend
React · Node.js · WordPress · Internationalization
AI
LLM Agents · Prompt Engineering · MCP · AIOps Alerting
Domain
E-commerce Platforms · Catalog & Pricing Systems · Payments & Fraud · Resilience Engineering · Large-scale Migration