Bryan Schwab

Engineering Leader • Redwood City, CA

Engineering leader (ex-Venmo, ex-Meta) and current founder. 25+ years modernizing regulated, mission-critical financial systems. Now running a GenAI-first, agentic SDLC daily at Quirence AI with Claude Code, Codex, Grok/xAI, and a customized OpenClaw deployment, plus internal tooling so autonomous coding agents collaborate effectively with the team.

Aug 2025 – Present

Co-Founder & Technical Lead

Quirence AI

Running a GenAI-first, agentic SDLC end to end with Claude Code, Codex, Grok/xAI, and a customized OpenClaw deployment, plus internal tooling so autonomous coding agents collaborate with the team. Built an agentic commerce platform on a multi-service GCP stack (GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Pulumi IaC) with Vertex AI Gemini for vision-driven browser automation and hybrid BM25 + vector search over a ~370k product catalog. Stripe Issuing for virtual cards, with early prototyping of MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) for agent-initiated payments. Currently in closed beta.

Aug 2024 – Aug 2025

Senior Director, Software Development

Venmo (PayPal)

Led a 200+ engineer Product Engineering organization across iOS, Android, and Web. Managed Directors and Senior Managers through ambiguity, regulatory scrutiny, and platform modernization, while sustaining delivery on portfolios processing $300B+ in annual payment volume. Directed Consumer Financial Services (Credit Card, Debit Card, Teen banking), Core P2P, Search, Social Feed, and the "Pay with Venmo" checkout.

May 2023 – Mar 2024

Head of Security Software Engineering

Mysten Labs

Designed and implemented company-wide AI infrastructure. Built data pipelines in Snowflake that cut annual cloud compute costs by 70%+. Integrated on-chain data into the security data lake for real-time monitoring, scam/fraud prevention, and automated threat detection.

Oct 2014 – May 2023

Engineering Manager

Meta

Managed managers and 40–50 engineers across MPK, NYC, London, and TLV to ship the Facebook family of apps to billions of users. Built the Libra L1 blockchain infrastructure under regulatory scrutiny and founded the Developer Infrastructure and Ecosystem teams. Directed Meta Fintech security including the Instagram NFT launch. Drove Rust adoption inside Meta and helped establish the Rust Foundation.

Mar 2013 – Jul 2014

Director of Engineering

WePay

Led WePay's core platform engineering. APIs and SDKs handled large payment volumes for third-party developers. Overhauled the security posture to streamline PCI auditing and reduce compliance turnaround.

Feb 2011 – Nov 2012

Development Director

Kabam

Designed and migrated to a studio-wide payments system supporting in-game micro transactions, bundles, and promotions. Ran early R&D and proof of concepts for Bitcoin integration.

Jan 2008 – Jan 2011

Staff Software Engineer

Etsy

Built the initial checkout and payments platform across multiple generations. The revenue it generated was a major factor in Etsy's IPO. Led architectural migrations (Postgres → MySQL) and performance work to resolve scaling bottlenecks during hypergrowth.

Apr 2006 – Jan 2008

Senior Software Engineer

Presto.com

Developed recurring billing backend and designed online store checkout. Integrated billing with third-party fulfillment APIs.

Mar 1999 – Mar 2006

Senior Software Engineer

eBay

Led the $50M Global Billing migration and integrated eBay's billing system with PayPal. Handled $130M+ in annual transactions on a regulated, mission-critical legacy stack.

Mar 1998 – Mar 1999

Software Engineer

Wired

Refactored Hotbot search engine code for performance. Redesigned backend advertising system, contributing to tripling ad revenue.

Jan 1997 – Feb 1998

Application Engineer

NetGravity

Consulted with CNN and Warner Bros on performance optimization. Developed Apache and Netscape web server modules.

AI & GenAI

LLMs (Gemini, Claude, Gemma, Ollama), Vertex AI, agentic browser automation (computer use), hybrid retrieval (BM25 + vector), embeddings, LLM guardrails, prompt engineering

AI Development Tooling

Claude Code, Codex, Grok/xAI, OpenClaw, MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Cloud Infrastructure

GCP (GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Datastream, Firebase Hosting, Artifact Registry), AWS (Cognito), Pulumi, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes

Observability

VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, Grafana, Prometheus, stackdriver-exporter

Core Stack & DevOps

TypeScript, Python, Node.js, React, Flutter/Dart, FastAPI, Express, SQL, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, Stripe (Issuing + Payments)

B.S. Computer Engineering

Florida Atlantic University

English (native), German (fluent)