Brain Surprise
A full-stack web development and data-engineering consultancy
About Us
Brain Surprise is a full-stack web-development and data-engineering consultancy.
Founded and led by senior engineers formerly at Uber, Goldman Sachs, and Lumosity.
With deep experience with building web applications from the ground up
And years of expertise in making big data accessible.
Skilled in a variety of technologies with emphasis on distributed processing and micro services.
We’ve led teams to build large and complex applications, serving as the entire technical side of businesses.
And partnered with existing engineering teams to carve out and own essential infrastructure and product pieces.
We are leaders in our field, having written important open-source projects and pushed the bleeding edge of this rapidly evolving domain.
We’d love to work with you.
What We Offer
Virtual CTO
HIPAA Compliant Infrastructure
Web-Application Development
Scalable/Distributed Systems
Data Engineering
AWS and Google Cloud Services Expertise
Development Team Management
Language Expertise
AWS
Lambda
EMR
ECS
EC2
Redshift
DynamoDb
Technologies
Docker
Kafka/Confluent
Hadoop
Hive
Spark
Serverless
Rails
Django
Angular
React
Postgresql
Mysql
Airflow
Who We’ve Worked With
What People Are Saying
“Again and again, we have seen Brain Surprise add immediate value to our application while staying within budget and keeping a forward-looking eye on where we are going as a business.”
— Sam Woldenberg
Head of Product, Titeg
“...they built the foundation of our data-engineering platform and have since expanded their work to help us level up our growth engineering stack. Through their work, we were able to gain critical new insights from our data as well as automate and scale our marketing analytics.”
— Fabian Seelbach
Chief Marketing Officer, Curology
“We recommend them without reservation to any other company looking to work with a versatile software development team.”
— Kerina Hayashi
VP Product and Design, Spendgo
“As consultants, they have a strong sense of ownership and can deliver projects on time and in scope with very little direction and oversight. Coupled with their significant background in the modern data ecosystem and ability to ask deep, incisive questions in defining project scope, this is extremely valuable to early-stage companies.”
— Marc Bollinger
Data Engineering Manager, Lumosity
Meet The Team
Rob Froetscher
Rob is an engineer who loves working at the intersection of human and computer problems. He strives for clear and concise solutions where humans let computers do what they are best at. Though this is a simple principle, it leads to his projects adding value immediately with minimal complexity, and being easy to change and adapt in the future.
He started his career in marketing, but then spent many years as a growth engineer at Lumosity. He then transitioned to the data-engineering team, where he and Andy wrote an open-source project to help the company’s employees more easily access data, and where he worked on the company’s big-data pipeline. Rob started Brain Surprise in 2017, and has served companies in industries ranging from healthcare to commodities to telecommunications.
Sam Marcellus
Sam cut his teeth writing C++ for a financial data software company, FactSet, where he developed a solid foundation of technical and project management skills. From there, he joined as an early engineer at Uber in 2013. During the next 5 years, he worked on everything from driver payments, to internal tooling, to data infrastructure, to privacy, to standing up Uber’s first non-US data center in China. In the chaotic startup environment, he developed a breadth of knowledge in areas such as Distributed Systems, Data Pipelines, SQL and NoSQL Databases, Differential Privacy, and worked with a variety of technologies including Python, Scala, Go, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Redis.
At both companies, Sam was both an individual contributor and engineering manager and various points. He is comfortable in technical leadership roles on small teams, helping a team deliver while staying close to the engineering and product management process.
Andrew Xue
Andy is a software engineer via the sciences, his first big project involved implementing a Monte Carlo model of DNA chains. Later he moved on to work in the demanding Program Trading Technology team at Goldman Sachs where he learned to solve problems under pressure and to deliver on deadlines. There he was a team lead in charge of the Sales Trading platform as well as the sales attribution system.
After GS, he joined Lumosity as one of founding data engineers there, quickly scaling up the data infrastructure as the company and its need for data grew exponentially. He worked on a number of “big data” platforms including Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka/Confluent.
As a developer, he has deep experience on how to structure code and systems to minimize complexity. He believes in straightforward effective code and has worked in a variety of paradigms, equally comfortable with OOP, compositional, as well as functional styles of programming.