Brandon Bjelland

Engineer & Leader | Scaling infrastructure and multiplying technical staff at Palo Alto Networks

St Paul, Minnesota, United States

About

I help organizations deliver high-quality software efficiently by taking radical ownership, empowering peers, and leveraging modern practices. As a hands-on technical leader, I work across the organizational stack — advising on strategy, engaging stakeholders, and tackling the toughest engineering challenges. I believe the best results come from connecting people, technologies, and ideas. Organizational archaeology, a laser-focus on business problems, and a light touch are my sharpest tools for steering departments toward happiness, sustainability, and high-performance. I’m adaptive but generally biased toward… • Doing over analyzing: I dive in to produce minimum viable products, gaining domain understanding while aiming for production-quality deliverables, iterating until the job is done. • Showing over telling: A demo speaks volumes. • People over technology: I focus on pragmatic solutions and long-term ownership, advising based on the business and team needs rather than the flashiest tech. • Communicating in multiple mediums: Code, talks, docs, diagrams, and presentations — ideas are only as impactful as they are effectively communicated.

Experience

  • Senior Principal DevOps Engineer at Palo Alto Networks
    Jul 2025 - Present · 1 yr

  • Protect AI (Full-time · 1 yr 4 mos)
    • Staff Software Engineer
      Jan 2025 - Jul 2025 · 7 mos

      Platform-infra lead but still just a humble farmer.

    • Staff Solutions Architect
      Apr 2024 - Jul 2025 · 1 yr 4 mos

  • Onix (Seattle, Washington, United States · Remote)
    • Director - Field Engineering
      Jan 2024 - Apr 2024 · 4 mos

    • Principal Enterprise Architect
      Aug 2023 - Dec 2023 · 5 mos

  • Co-Founding Engineer at Substratus AI
    Jul 2023 - Aug 2023 · 2 mos

    We developed an MLOps platform to orchestrate ML primitives on Kubernetes. https://substratus.ai/

  • Founder, Cloud Infrastructure Architect at Run at Scale
    Sep 2017 - Aug 2023 · 6 yrs

    I spend each day steering organizations toward future-forward technologies, modelling how to adopt them within their business context. By the end of a successful engagement, the customer is comfortable owning every last deliverable and efficiently operating that system at scale. What's that mean practically? I'm most often on the ground with ICs, helping design, author, reason about, troubleshoot, and enable fast delivery of reliable distributed systems. Partners: Google, Data Piper, Atmospheric, Globant, Container Heroes, New Context, BroadPoint Group. End-customers run the gamut from upstarts to fortune 100s. My personal sweet spot is in the middle but I've successfully worked with outstanding teams in companies of every size.