Brandon Locke

With a foundation in mathematics from Drexel University, I began my career as a research analyst at Independence Blue Cross, spending four years deep in healthcare data — building Tableau reports, modeling Episodes of Care, and extracting insights from large Teradata databases using R, SAS, and SQL. The work was meaningful, but I kept finding myself more energized by the systems producing the data than the presentations summarizing it. I wanted to build things, not just describe them — so I went back to Drexel, earned my MS in Computer Science in 2019, and made the jump to software engineering.

Since then I've spent the better part of a decade working on large-scale distributed systems in financial services. At Vanguard I cut my teeth on Java microservices and AWS, and since 2021 I've been a Senior Software Engineer at Capital One, where I design and build asynchronous distributed systems using Golang, AWS SQS, Kafka, DynamoDB, Redis, and ECS Fargate. Most of my work lives at the intersection of system design and cross-team collaboration — figuring out how large, loosely-coupled systems should talk to each other, and then making sure they actually do.

When I'm not at work, I build things for fun. This site is home to a handful of personal projects that span whatever I happen to be curious about — from NFL win probability models and F1 driver statistics, to a task tracking app, and a tool that plots the Bobiverse's Bob fleet across the galaxy chapter by chapter. The throughline is the same one that pulled me into engineering in the first place: I'd rather ship something I can point to than let an idea die in a slide deck.