Brian Leonard
Engineer at Induction AI
Menlo Park, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Leonard is an experienced software engineer and technology leader with 15 years building and scaling products from startup to acquisition, currently focusing on context management for AI workloads at Induction AI. He has led engineering and product teams as CTO and founder (TaskRabbit, Grouparoo) and later directed connector engineering at Airbyte, shipping hundreds of integrations and making connector creation accessible via no-code and AI-assisted tooling. Brian combines hands-on backend skills—evident in contributions to notable open-source projects like instacart/makara and Airbyte connectors—with strategic product execution during acquisitions and large rollouts. He blends technical depth in distributed systems and data integration with operational experience in reliability and AI-driven data contextualization. Based in Menlo Park and holder of an MBA and a BS in Computer Engineering, he’s as comfortable refactoring connection pooling logic as he is negotiating post-acquisition transitions. Outside work he prioritizes family, travel, and continuous learning, which fuels his pragmatic, user-focused approach to building software.
15 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering, BS, Computer Engineering at Clemson UniversityMBA, High Tech Program, MBA, High Tech Program at D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University
Github Skills (19)
apim10
postgresql10
data-pipelines10
dbconnection10
python10
api-design10
ruby10
etl10
api10
connection-pool10
activerecord10
error-handling10
data-pipeline10
data-integration10
connection-pooling10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
instacart/makara
Nov 2015 - Jul 2019
A Read-Write Proxy for Connections; Also provides an ActiveRecord adapter.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:103 commits, 58 PRs, 98 pushes in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on enhancing the `makara` library, which is a read-write proxy and ActiveRecord adapter. Their contributions include fixing bugs related to timeouts, blacklisting connections, and transaction handling. They also refactored the code to use a round-robin strategy for connection pooling and added a priority failover strategy. Additionally, they updated the library's version.
proxyread-writerailsrubyadapter
airbytehq/airbyte
Jan 2022 - Jun 2022
The leading data integration platform for ETL / ELT data pipelines from APIs, databases & files to data warehouses, data lakes & data lakehouses. Both self-hosted and Cloud-hosted.
Role in this project:Data Engineer
Data EngineerContributions:129 reviews, 16 commits, 515 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the development of a new data source integration for Pivotal Tracker. Their work involved creating streams for various Pivotal Tracker entities like projects, stories, and activity, which included defining schemas, handling pagination, and implementing authentication. The user demonstrated expertise in utilizing the Airbyte CDK to build data pipelines. Additionally, the commits show modifications to existing connectors (Zendesk and Sendgrid) related to integration testing.
operationpythondataintegration-platformdata-warehouse
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