Brian Howald
Engineering Manager at Tilt (formerly Empower)
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBrian Howald is an engineering manager with 14 years of experience building and operating credit card acquisition and decisioning platforms for fintechs, currently leading post-acquisition migration and product launches at Tilt (formerly Empower). He combines hands-on engineering—writing and reviewing code, debugging incidents, and guiding migrations from Python to .NET—with people-first leadership that has produced exceptionally low turnover through multiple reorganizations. Brian has repeatedly shifted decisioning from code-as-policy to self-serve third-party engines, freeing engineers to ship features while empowering credit analysts to own policy. His work spans frontend systems, vendor integrations, fraud and bank-linking optimizations, and machine-learning-adjacent risk tooling, with measurable impact including major cost savings and large-scale campaign acquisition. Not obvious from the title: he ramps teams quickly into new tech stacks (bringing nearly all engineers up to .NET competency in weeks) while maintaining conversion parity and operational stability. A Stanford-trained CS and Urban Studies grad based in New York, he thrives at the intersection of product, credit, and engineering execution.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (16)
camera10
typescript10
twitter10
traffic10
parking10
dts9
typescript-definitions9
python8
flowtype7
cli6
versioning4
ruby3
factory2
toolbox2
traits1
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
LifebookerInc/api_resource
Sep 2011 - Apr 2016
Contributions:74 commits, 10 pushes, 2 branches in 4 years 7 months
bdhowald/hows_my_driving
May 2018 - Jan 2023
Python script to respond to tweets about traffic violations using data about parking and camera violations from https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/
Contributions:306 commits, 1 PR, 256 pushes in 4 years 8 months
pythonrespondviolationscameraopendata
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