Galway, Ireland

Finbarr Brady

Software Architect · Technical Leader

I turn partner and product requirements into clear architecture — breaking complex features down with service owners to find the simplest solution that scales, not the most complicated one.

Download Résumé LinkedIn

Webex Architect & Thought Leader

Architect across Webex Wholesale and Webex for BroadWorks — owning key features, scaling, security and performance.

Bottom-Up Thinker

Across the full stack — from open source at the cloud-OS level, to Kubernetes, to DB & queuing, to the service application-layer building blocks.

Collaborative Leader & Mentor

Partnering with PM, UX, engineering managers and tech leads — and mentoring engineers — to deliver a delightful experience that's built to be maintained and built upon.

About

I'm a software architect and technical leader with 20+ years building and scaling complex, distributed systems — across cloud, mobile and large multi-tenant platforms.

Today I'm a Cisco Webex architect and thought leader across Webex Wholesale and Webex for BroadWorks, owning key features along with scaling, security and performance. I set architecture standards and drive cross-cutting technical decisions for always-on platforms that serve carrier and SMB partners worldwide.

I'm a bottom-up thinker — comfortable from open source at the cloud-OS level, up through Kubernetes, database and queuing, to the service application-layer building blocks. That full-stack view lets me find the simplest solution that scales, rather than the most complicated one.

I work closely with PM, UX, engineering managers and technical leaders, and I mentor software engineers — turning partner and product requirements into architecture that delivers a delightful experience, built to be maintained and built upon.

Areas of Expertise

The disciplines I bring to architecting systems that have to stay up, scale predictably, and be safe to change.

Architecture

Distributed systems · multi-tenant cloud / SaaS platforms · architecture governance & decision records · service topology & dependency modelling · API design

Scale & Reliability

Performance & capacity analysis · concurrency & rate-limit modelling · failure-mode characterisation · resilience, retry & rollback · platform lifecycle & health

Technical Leadership

Raising the engineering bar · technical sign-off & quality gates · global matrixed alignment · mentoring emerging talent · influence without authority

Cloud & DevOps

GCP · OpenStack · Docker · Kubernetes · Jenkins · GitHub Actions · CI/CD pipelines · security-by-default practices

Engineering

Java · Spring / Spring Boot · Python · event-driven systems (Kafka, SQS) · full-stack & cloud development · native Apple platforms (Swift / Objective-C)

Observability & AI

Metrics & dashboards (Grafana) · AI-assisted engineering (Claude, Copilot, Codex, Gemini) · test automation & end-to-end verification

Experience

Software Technical Leader / Architect

2021 – Present

Cisco Systems · Webex Wholesale

Ensure architectural coherence through governance practices and documented decision records — leading the platform's Definition of Ready process so complex, cross-cutting features arrive engineering-ready with security, serviceability, observability, testing and API concerns resolved up front.
Led the architecture and performance review for scaling an always-on platform through large-scale carrier migrations — a programme spanning 150,000+ customer organisations and 1.5M+ users against hard end-of-life deadlines.
Characterised the end-to-end performance envelope across 14+ cloud services and 160+ API combinations, identified the binding throughput and concurrency constraints, and turned production-discovered failure modes into a validated, phased scale-up model.
Champion platform lifecycle health, reliability and security-by-default for unattended 24×7 migration tooling; drive technical decisions across product, UX, architects, engineers and external technical leads in a global matrixed organisation.

Senior Software Engineer

2011 – 2022

Cisco Systems · Webex Teams & Broadsoft integration

Full-stack engineering across on-premise, hybrid and cloud — building microservices in Java / Spring Boot and Python with event-driven messaging (Kafka, SQS), on Docker, Kubernetes, OpenStack, Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
Delivered core capabilities for Webex Teams and the migration of Broadsoft services onto the Cisco cloud, building the domain depth that underpins my architecture work today.

Co-Founder & CTO

until 2016

Webreach Ltd · native iOS / macOS product company

Owned all technical direction; designed, built and shipped multiple App Store products downloaded 420,000+ times, including a #1-ranked title — full ownership from architecture through release, monetisation and live operations.

Earlier Career

Lumension Security · Nortel · Ericsson

Test & automation engineering leadership across telecom (CORE / WCDMA OSS), contact-centre and endpoint-security products — reusable automation frameworks, end-to-end and performance validation, and data-integrity verification from network node to presentation layer.

Product Portfolio

Earlier product work — native iOS / macOS apps I designed, built and shipped end-to-end.

Jelly SMS

A #1 Irish messaging app delivering innovative text messaging across Apple mobile and desktop devices, with a shared core and a polished, user-friendly experience. Originally developed as JSMS alongside my old pal Keith Flynn, RIP. ❤️‍🩹

Beyond Meditation

A mindfulness app helping users reach deeper meditation through guided sessions, ambient sound and progress tracking — rich in AVFoundation, StoreKit and in-app purchases.

Newseum — Extra! Extra!

The original Newseum.org mobile app, bringing the front pages of newspapers worldwide to iPhone and iPad.