Braid

Braid is a digital banking platform that gives community banks and credit unions a new path to fee income and deposit growth, moving real money over wire, ACH, and FedNow rails. I joined in March 2024 as the cloud architect, and I am the sole infrastructure engineer supporting six backend developers, the product team, and the auditors.

The platform runs across 25 AWS accounts, with 7 production banking environments. In the last 12 months it delivered 99.9%+ uptime with zero customer-impacting events. More than 23 incidents were caught and resolved by monitoring before any customer noticed.

The biggest milestone was FedNow, the instant payment network from the Federal Reserve. I designed, certified, and shipped the end-to-end integration, working directly with the Federal Reserve, and the numbers came out better than anyone expected: 1.7-second cold-start processing and 60,000 transactions per second on 0.25 vCPU Fargate tasks, well inside the Fed sub-15-second SLA. This opened a whole new revenue stream, since the platform can now compete on instant payments.

On the compliance side, I led the SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI DSS work with ISO 27001-aligned controls: remediated more than 15 failed controls and coordinated audit evidence across 7 accounts. This removed the final approval step for regulated partnerships. I also strengthened OFAC compliance by finding a 7-month monitoring gap on the BIS Denied Persons List downloads, tracing it to an expired government TLS certificate, and shipping the fix.

Day to day, I keep the engineers shipping without a platform team by owning cloud, security, compliance, database, DevOps, and SRE end to end. Onboarding a new bank used to take 30 days of manual work; with everything standardized as infrastructure-as-code it now takes 3 hours. Over 12 months that came to 216 completed tickets and 214 pages of architecture docs, runbooks, and postmortems, so the platform never depends on one person's memory.