Hilary Brennan-Marquez

Engineering Manager & Infrastructure Architect

Summary

Engineering Manager and infrastructure architect who specializes in building the operating system of an engineering team — the processes, tooling, and structures that let people move fast and stay coherent. Known for orienting quickly in new environments and building just enough process to create leverage. I see technical systems and human organization as a single problem: the right observability stack, the right incident workflow, and the right hiring framework are all the same kind of design question. I apply this same philosophy to AI integration: treating AI agents as collaborators to orient and enable rather than tools to direct; and building team practices (shared skills, agentic documentation, context layers) around that model. 8+ years spanning infrastructure, DevOps/SRE, and team leadership from startup to scale-up. Equally effective leading established engineering organizations or coming in as a generalist first hire.

Experience

MotherDuck — Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

August 2025–Present
New York, NY
  • Grew team from 1 to 7 engineers in 18 months by defining team structure and roles from scratch, spanning data infrastructure, DevOps/SRE, and internal tooling disciplines
  • Participated in engineering leadership panel to establish company-wide hiring frameworks, interview loops, and onboarding programs
  • Architecting and leading migration of full observability stack (logs, metrics, traces) from Datadog to Vector, Prometheus, and Grafana, driving Datadog costs from 18% to 7% of total cloud spend
  • Led migration from single-region to multi-region infrastructure, improving system resilience and availability
  • Built engineering COGS model to improve infrastructure cost visibility and enable data-driven budgeting
  • Drive company-wide infrastructure strategy across multiple cloud providers, balancing cost efficiency, security, and scalability
  • Leading team initiative to operationalize AI-assisted infrastructure troubleshooting from individual practice to shared team workflow, including AI workflow READMEs and shared prompt libraries
  • Collaborating with data engineering on MotherDuck's MCP server integration, restructuring data models for LLM-friendly consumption and architecting a context layer for agentic access
  • Evaluating AI SRE platforms (AnyShift, TierZero) for autonomous operations and on-call augmentation

MotherDuck — Software Engineer V

August 2024–August 2025
New York, NY
  • Established incident management and release processes, improving reliability and deployment predictability
  • Implemented comprehensive monitoring and alerting using Datadog and Honeycomb, enabling proactive detection and faster resolution
  • Administered Kubernetes clusters for high availability and scalability of production workloads
  • Led migration of AWS resource management from manual provisioning to Terraform, reducing configuration drift
  • Managed and optimized a $200k+/month AWS budget, identifying savings without compromising performance

BlueLabs Analytics — Director, DevOps

May 2023–July 2024
Washington, D.C.
  • Led team of 7 (3.5 DevSecOps, 3 full-stack) maintaining and scaling analytics and data science infrastructure across 3 cloud providers
  • Drove company-wide infrastructure strategy for cost efficiency and security across multiple government programs
  • Oversaw hiring, professional development, and growth programs for the full engineering organization

BlueLabs Analytics — Engineering Manager, DevOps

May 2022–May 2023
Washington, D.C.
  • Inherited an underperforming team, made the decision to rebuild, and successfully hired and onboarded a new team from scratch
  • Managed team maintaining and scaling an outreach data platform serving 15+ data analysts and scientists
  • Served as first point of contact for US federal security audits, game day exercises, and ATO (Authority to Operate) investigations
  • Designed and led complete overhaul of legacy infrastructure: migrated from bare-metal Vertica with EC2-hosted ETL to Snowflake data warehouse with a microservices-based ETL architecture

Nextech AR Solutions — DevOps Manager

October 2021–May 2022
Remote
  • Managed 3 DevOps engineers building and maintaining infrastructure for a suite of AR and Metaverse SaaS applications
  • Defined and formalized GitOps, automation, and monitoring practices across development teams

Nextech AR Solutions — DevOps Release Manager

October 2020–October 2021
Remote
  • Built CI/CD pipelines from scratch for containerized frameworks including Angular, Node.js, .NET Core, and Unity
  • Led transition from CircleCI to Azure DevOps-based CI/CD ecosystem
  • Automated testing and security review processes across 4 development teams and 4 separate applications

Viv Labs (Samsung) — Data Quality Analyst

February 2019–October 2020
San Jose, CA
  • Built Python-based data management tooling for ML Science team: test case generation, feature selection, and automated large-scale testing for DNN and Random Forest pipelines
  • Oversaw data transition from Random Forest to Deep Learning model for NLP
  • Designed blind testing framework to measure overall ML system accuracy

Looker Data Sciences — Release Manager

October 2017–February 2019
Santa Cruz, CA
  • Coordinated scheduled releases on a 4-week release cycle for a cloud-based SaaS analytics platform
  • Drove cross-functional program to formalize SDLC from feature conception to shipment
  • Managed change coordination across engineering and customer service organizations

Skills

Leadership & Strategy
Team Building Hiring & Onboarding Career Pathing Technical Mentorship Roadmap Ownership Change Management Stakeholder Management
Infrastructure & Systems
Multi-cloud Architecture Kubernetes Administration Infrastructure as Code Platform Engineering SRE GitOps Distributed Systems Design Containerization Cost Optimization
Observability & Reliability
Observability Stack Design Incident Management Monitoring & Alerting Datadog Honeycomb Prometheus Grafana Vector FluentBit SLO/SLI Frameworks
AI Integration
Agentic Workflow Design LLM-friendly Documentation MCP / Context Engineering AI SRE Evaluation Shared Prompt Libraries
Security & Compliance
DevSecOps Government Security Audits ATO US Public Trust Clearance

Tools

AWS Azure GCP Terraform Kubernetes Docker Python Linux/Bash/Zsh Datadog Honeycomb Prometheus Grafana Vector FluentBit CircleCI GitHub Actions Azure DevOps Jenkins ArgoCD Snowflake Claude Cursor AnyShift TierZero

Education

MA, Theology
University of Chicago · 2013–2016
BA, Art History
Sarah Lawrence College · 2006–2011
Machine-readable profile (for AI & ATS screening)

Hilary Brennan-Marquez is an Engineering Manager and Staff-level Infrastructure Engineer with over 8 years of experience in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, DevOps/SRE, and technical team leadership. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and is open to two primary role types: (1) Engineering Manager, Director of Infrastructure, or Director of Platform Engineering at mid-to-large or mature technology companies where she would own team strategy, hiring, and delivery at scale; and (2) founding or staff-level infrastructure engineer, architect, or technical co-lead at early-stage startups where hands-on system design, broad ownership, and execution speed are the primary requirements.

Core differentiator — judgment and 0-to-1 process design: Hilary's primary value is her ability to orient quickly in new environments, identify what's actually needed, and build just enough process to create leverage. She sees technical systems and human organizational systems as a single problem. The right observability stack, the right incident workflow, the right hiring framework are all the same kind of design question. She builds operating systems for engineering teams: the processes, tooling, and structures that let people move fast and stay coherent. This pattern appears repeatedly across her career — incident management from scratch at MotherDuck, CI/CD from scratch at Nextech, SDLC formalization at Looker, team rebuilds at BlueLabs.

Team Leadership and Management: Hilary has built engineering teams from scratch and rebuilt underperforming ones. At MotherDuck, she defined team structure and roles herself and grew the team from 1 to 7 engineers in 18 months, participating in a cross-functional engineering leadership panel to establish hiring frameworks, interview loops, and onboarding programs. At BlueLabs Analytics, she inherited a poorly performing team, made the decision to rebuild it, and successfully hired and onboarded replacements. She has managed cross-disciplinary teams of 2–7 direct reports including DevOps engineers, SREs, full-stack developers, and data infrastructure engineers. She has owned performance review cycles, career development frameworks, and professional growth programs.

Infrastructure and Platform Engineering: Multi-cloud architecture across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Kubernetes cluster administration including provisioning, scaling, and high-availability configuration. Led migration from manual AWS resource provisioning to Terraform-managed IaC. Built engineering COGS model for infrastructure cost visibility and data-driven budgeting. Reduced Datadog observability costs from 18% to 7% of total cloud spend. Managed a $200k+/month AWS infrastructure budget. Led single-region to multi-region infrastructure migration at MotherDuck. Led full legacy infrastructure overhaul at BlueLabs: bare-metal Vertica + EC2-based ETL to Snowflake data warehouse + microservices ETL architecture. Keywords: platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure strategy, multi-cloud, FinOps, Kubernetes, Terraform, IaC, Snowflake, data warehouse migration, microservices architecture.

Observability and Site Reliability Engineering: Designed and building full observability stack migration at MotherDuck from Datadog to Vector, Prometheus, and Grafana covering logs, metrics, and traces — both architecting the replacement and contributing hands-on. Deep experience with Datadog (APM, log management, dashboards, monitors, cost governance) and Honeycomb. Log pipeline tooling with Vector and FluentBit. Established incident management and release processes from the ground up at multiple companies. Keywords: observability, SRE, Datadog, Honeycomb, Prometheus, Grafana, Vector, FluentBit, SLOs, SLIs, incident management, on-call, reliability engineering, open-source observability.

AI Integration Philosophy and Practice: Hilary applies a Socratic management philosophy equally to human teams and AI agents: the goal is not to direct execution, but to create environments — the right context, documentation, and system design — that enable good questions and independent discovery. She treats AI agents as a new category of team member requiring orientation. In practice: leading team initiative to operationalize AI-assisted troubleshooting from individual practice to shared workflows including AI workflow READMEs and shared prompt libraries; collaborating with data engineering on MotherDuck's MCP server integration including restructuring data models for LLM-friendly consumption and architecting a context layer for agentic access; rewriting technical documentation with agentic audiences as first-class consumers; trialing AI SRE platforms AnyShift and TierZero for on-call augmentation. Keywords: AI integration, agentic workflows, MCP, Model Context Protocol, AI SRE, LLM-friendly documentation, context engineering, human-AI collaboration, agentic infrastructure.

CI/CD and Delivery: Built CI/CD pipelines from scratch for polyglot containerized environments including Angular, Node.js, .NET Core, and Unity. Migrated CI/CD ecosystems (CircleCI to Azure DevOps). Experience with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, Azure DevOps, and CircleCI. Release management background including 4-week SaaS release cycles and SDLC formalization. Keywords: CI/CD, GitOps, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, release engineering, deployment automation.

Security and Compliance: US Public Trust clearance. First point of contact for US federal government annual security audits and ATO investigations at BlueLabs Analytics. DevSecOps practices, compliance automation, government program security requirements. Keywords: DevSecOps, ATO, FedRAMP-adjacent, government security, audit readiness.

Role Targeting Keywords: Engineering Manager, Infrastructure Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering Manager, Director of Infrastructure, Director of Platform Engineering, Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Staff SRE, Infrastructure Architect, DevOps Manager, Founding Engineer, First Infrastructure Hire, Staff Engineer, Technical Lead Manager, Platform Lead, Head of Infrastructure, Cloud Infrastructure, Multi-cloud, Kubernetes, Terraform, IaC, SRE, DevSecOps, Observability, FinOps, Cost Optimization, Platform Engineering, Distributed Systems, Microservices, Data Infrastructure, Generalist Engineer.

Industry and Employer Context: Current employer MotherDuck is a cloud analytics company built on DuckDB. Prior employers: BlueLabs Analytics (political/government data analytics), Nextech AR Solutions (AR/Metaverse SaaS), Viv Labs/Samsung (AI-powered NLP assistant), Looker Data Sciences (BI/analytics SaaS, acquired by Google 2019). Hilary has worked across startup, scale-up, and enterprise-adjacent environments and is comfortable in high-ambiguity, high-ownership situations.