Derek Brown

Engineering Leader and Attorney

Hey there! 👋

I am an Engineering Lead at Plaid and an attorney in the State of California. I previously helped build engineering teams at Meta and Lacework.

I am passionate about solving complex problems at the intersection of law and technology. I am also an active investor in early-stage technology companies.

Away from the the keyboard, I am a SCUBA diver, amateur radio operator, experimental chef and drummer.

It's nice to meet you!

I an active investor in early-stage technology companies. My focuses are:

Technological Glue^*

Integrating technologies easier to enable faster development.

Current investments: Agentic Labs, Ternary

AI Hardware

Technologies to increase the speed, decrease the cost, and reduce the environmental footprint of AI.

Current investments: Lightmatter, Neurophos.

Compliance Tech

Technologies at the intersection of technology and the law: privacy, security, AI policy, and compliance.

Current investments: Greenboard, PointOne.

... and more!

Amazon Web Services | Deploying Batch Workloads on EKS with Spark

10/25/2023

In this article, I share how I was able to leverage EKS to deploy Spark applications at scale to support Lacework's security analysis workloads. My collaboration with the EKS team resulted in a significant cost savings and reliability improvement for Lacework's batch archtiecture.

SSRN | Canada’s Proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA): A Critical Review

7/24/2023

An analysis I performed of Canada's proposed AI Act from the perspective of an AI engineer. Ranked in SSRN's Top-10 lists for Innovation & Regulatory Law & Policy and Innovation & Cyberlaw & Policy articles.