Brian Davis

Lead Software Engineer · DAST (WebInspect)

Joined Micro Focus as a Senior Software Engineer in 2021, stayed through the OpenText acquisition, and was promoted to Lead in 2025. More than 250 production-integrated changes to a mature product with an installed base that cannot be disrupted, and roughly five major feature initiatives led from design through delivery.

• Led the WebInspect settings API, which exposes the product's full scan configuration surface programmatically, shipped as a library that separate products consume to drive scans. Wrote roughly 80 percent of it, including the override system and validation across every model in it. The largest thing I have owned here.
• Owned suppressed findings and false-positive export from 2023 to 2026: the original export feature, then import, merge behavior, correlation across providers, file encoding, and making the whole path thread-safe.
• Built HAR support end to end, letting a recorded browser session drive a scan, with a parser hardened against the non-standard files real tools emit.
• Owned SQL Express through the move to Entity Framework Core, on Windows and in Linux containers, restoring scan management under .NET 8 without breaking existing scan files. One of two engineers on the team developing against the Linux container branch.
• Led a Copilot governance framework with others on the team: modular repository instructions bounding AI-assisted change around high-risk projects, platform symmetry, localization and public APIs.

Independent AI research and systems engineering

A sequence-learning engine built from first principles, with no pretrained weights and no transformer underneath it, and the Rust trading terminal that supervises it. A spare-time project for many years, and close to a second full-time job for the last eighteen months. The terminal framework is complete and tested; the application renders live market data from a TimescaleDB store today, with the trading-enablement layer in progress.

• The engine learns continuously from surprise rather than in a training phase, reads one signal at several time scales at once, and predicts a set of forward paths instead of a point estimate. A linear sparse attention scheme keeps it inside a single consumer GPU.
• The terminal is Rust on egui and wgpu: one typed command surface used identically by a human click and by the model, a permission layer in front of it, every order through the same risk gate, deterministic replay against history, and an enforced per-phase 144Hz frame budget.

Lead Software Engineer and Systems Architect

Sole engineer on a complete factory automation and ERP platform across three hardware generations, in continuous production throughout. Requirements through deployment, plus the corporate IT it ran on.

• Replaced mechanical machine timers with programmable control, improving timing accuracy to roughly a tenth of a second and enabling functionality such as vacuum molding. Cycle time fell by at least 20 percent.
• Wrote a real-time kernel in C and assembly, and a token-ring-style network stack over RS-485, because neither existed for the original Z180 hardware and the plant floor was too electrically noisy for anything simpler.
• Migrated the controller to x86 and Windows Embedded in C++ when the project outgrew that hardware, rebuilding the GUI, the development environment and the OS integration.
• Built the PostgreSQL collection layer and the C# clients the business ran on: real-time productivity and profitability per machine and per employee, shift overviews, and inventory and customer management. An 8 percent productivity gain in the first week online.