Dirk Brand
Staff Software Engineer at Arize AI
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDirk Brand is a product-focused Staff Software Engineer and engineering leader with ~5 years of professional experience building AI agents, developer platforms, and payments infrastructure. He has scaled teams and production APIs—most recently as Head of Engineering at Agno, where he led Agent Runtime APIs and remote execution infrastructure and grew the team from 5 to 15 while keeping delivery velocity. Now at Arize AI, Dirk combines Python backend expertise with a specialization in AI agent frameworks, contributing to the open-source Agno project by implementing Gemini tool-calling compatibility, async web crawling, and new multimodal tools. He has a strong ML systems background from Praelexis and practical payments orchestration experience from Primer, enabling him to bridge research, product and production reliably. Based in the Western Cape, he holds an MSc in Computer Science and is notable for shifting synchronous integrations to async in agent runtimes—improving scalability and extensibility in real-world deployments.
5 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc) Computer Science, Master of Science (MSc) Computer Science at Stellenbosch University
German, Afrikaans, English
Github Skills (12)
asynchronous10
tooling10
gemini10
integrate10
python10
integrations10
async10
crawling9
web-crawler9
webscraping9
webscraper9
crawler9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
agno-agi/agno
Oct 2024 - Apr 2025
A lightweight library for building Multimodal Agents. Use it to give LLMs superpowers like memory, knowledge, tools and reasoning.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 releases, 619 reviews, 480 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Dirk primarily focused on enhancing the backend functionality of the project by addressing issues and implementing features related to tool calling within the Gemini model. They resolved compatibility problems for functions with and without parameters in the Gemini model. Additionally, the user refactored the web crawler integration, switching from a deprecated synchronous crawler to an asynchronous one. Furthermore, the user added support for new tools, such as a Giphy tool, expanding the project's capabilities.
python-librarypythondatadata-sciencellmops
agno-agi/agno-docs
Jan 2025 - Apr 2025
Contributions:71 reviews, 59 PRs, 89 pushes in 2 months
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