The People Behind the Playbook

Engineers, strategists & builders shipping cloud-native work.

Tech Stack Playbook® is a boutique technology & cloud consulting company — a team of elite, senior operators who architect, ship, and maintain modern software systems. We pair technical depth with brand polish so clients move fast without compromising on craft.

11
Team Members
7
AI Agents
20K+
Community Reach
AWS
Hero & Partner
01 / Founder

Leadership rooted in building, teaching, and showing the work.

Every engagement starts with our founder's philosophy: ship real, educate openly, and leave clients with a stack they can actually operate.

Brian Hough
— Founder & CEO

Brian Hough

Lead Software Engineer — AWS DevTools Hero

Brian is the founder and CEO of Tech Stack Playbook® — a self-taught software engineer, AWS DevTools Hero, and public educator with a 20K+ following across socials. He leads the company's technical vision, client engagements, and content arm.

His day-to-day spans hands-on engineering, shaping architecture decisions for enterprise clients, and teaching modern cloud practices through talks, courses, and playbooks. Brian's lane is turning messy problems into crisp, shippable systems — and then teaching other engineers how it was done.

AWS DevTools Hero Python TypeScript Terraform
— Affiliations
02 / The Team

A senior bench: each a specialist, all owners of the outcome.

Tap any card to expand. Each person below owns a clear lane — engineering, strategy, brand, operations — yet they operate as a single unit on every engagement.

Josh Grant
01 —

Josh Grant

Solutions Architect

Josh is the tech lead on our client engagements — the one architecting the systems before a single line of production code gets written. He builds cloud infrastructure as code, designs the deployment path, and owns the bridge from whiteboard to production.

Beyond architecture, Josh is a full-stack developer and a pillar of our client success function — pairing technical depth with the hands-on support clients actually feel day to day.

— Focus Areas

Solutions Architecture Infrastructure as Code AWS Full-Stack Dev Client Success Cloud Deployments
Rob Stewart
02 —

Rob Stewart

Senior Software Engineer

Rob is our cloud and backend specialist — deep in Terraform, structured code, and moving workloads to the cloud the right way. If it's infrastructure, pipelines, or backend services, Rob is in it.

He's also our go-to Python developer, building the backend systems and data workflows that power client platforms.

— Focus Areas

Terraform Python AWS Backend Systems Cloud Workloads Infrastructure as Code
Ajay Tripathi
03 —

Ajay Tripathi

Senior Software Engineer

Ajay is a full-stack developer on the engineering team — shipping features end-to-end across the stack. From frontend polish to backend plumbing, Ajay turns scoped work into shipped product.

— Focus Areas

Full-Stack Dev Frontend Backend Feature Delivery
Warren Clark
04 —

Warren Clark

SRE & Security Engineer

Warren leads site reliability and security on our engineering team — focused on automation, observability, and AI-driven reliability for large-scale platforms. He builds AI agents for incident management and anomaly detection, owns release automation, and designs the observability stack across Splunk, Dynatrace, and Grafana.

His background spans SRE, software engineering, and security — with hands-on experience across Akamai, AWS, Azure, and the modern web systems clients actually depend on.

— Focus Areas

SRE Observability Release Automation AI Agents Incident Management Splunk Dynatrace Grafana AWS Azure Akamai Security
Stran Mitchell
05 —

Stran Mitchell

Cloud Solutions Advisor

Stran leads client success and sales — the connective tissue between our team and the clients we serve. She manages relationships from first conversation through ongoing engagement.

Her focus is simple: make sure every client is operating at full capacity and getting the outcomes they came to us for.

— Focus Areas

Client Success Sales Account Management Relationship Strategy
Barbara Schisler
06 —

Barbara Schisler

Technical Client Support

Barbara is part of our client success team — focused on making sure every client deliverable lands on time and at the quality bar Tech Stack Playbook® is known for.

She works alongside engagement leads to safeguard the strength and success of each client project, keeping timelines, scope, and outcomes aligned from kickoff through delivery.

— Focus Areas

Client Success Project Delivery Engagement Management Timeline Ownership Client Outcomes
Rob Napoli
07 —

Rob Napoli

Operations & Strategy

Rob leads operations and strategy at Tech Stack Playbook® — ensuring the company's continued strength, structure, and scalability as we grow.

He brings a track record of running large multinational teams and providing leadership at scale. Rob's job is making sure the business runs as sharp as the work we deliver.

— Focus Areas

Operations Strategy Leadership Scaling Teams Multinational Ops
Sonny Sangha
08 —

Sonny Sangha

Technology & Innovation

Sonny is our technology strategist and advisor — focused on the cutting edge. AI, emerging tooling, and the next wave of what clients should actually be building.

His lane is envisioning where technology is going and translating that into practical direction for our clients and our work.

— Focus Areas

AI / ML Strategy Emerging Tech Technical Advisory Innovation
Evan Thompson
09 —

Evan Thompson

Creative Strategy

Evan owns creative strategy for our clients — making sure brand styling, creative direction, and the polish layer on every deliverable is locked and loaded.

He's the one keeping the work sharp, cohesive, and ready to ship into the world.

— Focus Areas

Creative Strategy Brand Styling Creative Direction Client Delivery
Beverly Ngo
10 —

Beverly Ngo

Brand Strategy

Beverly heads brand strategy for Tech Stack Playbook® — the force behind our brand consistency, creative direction, and everything marketing and outreach.

She keeps the brand crisp and unified across every surface: creative ideas, marketing campaigns, and external-facing communications. The polish you see on the brand is Beverly's work.

— Focus Areas

Brand Strategy Creative Direction Marketing Outreach Brand Consistency
03 / Agentic AI

MacMaximus: the agentic AI engine running our business.

A roster of specialized AI agents — each operating a different lane of the business. Built on Claude via AWS Bedrock with Discord-native interfaces. Tap any agent to see commands and capabilities.

Stacky
Online
01 —

Stacky

Executive Assistant

The resident brain of MacMaximus — a conversational co-pilot fluent in our entire ecosystem. Infrastructure questions, code reasoning, deployment context, architecture trade-offs — Stacky has an answer, and it remembers the ones before.

— Capabilities

  • Contextual MemoryEvery conversation picks up where the last one left off.
  • Bedrock-Grade ReliabilityRuns on Claude via AWS Bedrock with automatic failover for bulletproof uptime.
  • Cross-Domain FluencySpeaks infrastructure, code, deployments, architecture, and process — natively.
  • Anywhere AccessIntegrated across the MacMaximus platform and every team surface we touch.
Security
Online
02 —

Security

Vulnerability Coordinator

An autonomous sentinel watching every dependency tree across our client base. Catches CVEs before they hit the news, tracks supply chain attacks in real time, and surfaces only what actually matters — ranked by blast radius.

— Capabilities

  • Multi-Source IntelligenceAggregates premium data feeds, NVD, OSV, and GitHub Advisories into one signal stream.
  • Dependency CorrelationMaps every new vulnerability against the exact client systems that are actually exposed.
  • Supply Chain RadarIdentifies and tracks active attack campaigns across npm, PyPI, Go, and Maven.
  • Severity-Ranked AlertsCritical issues jump the queue. Noise gets suppressed. Signal-to-noise: maxed.
  • Package Risk ScoringQuality, maintenance, and supply-chain risk scores for any package in seconds.
  • Always-On ScanningContinuous sweeps running 24/7 — deep audits trigger on demand.
Architect
Online
03 —

Architect

System Design Advisor

Describe a system in plain English and Architect returns a production-grade diagram — AWS, microservices, data pipelines, network topology, whatever the build demands. Whiteboard-to-ship in seconds, no dragging boxes required.

— Capabilities

  • Natural Language InputDescribe architecture conversationally. Architect figures out the structure.
  • Multi-Domain DiagramsAWS, Microservices, Data Pipelines, Client-Server, Network Topology, Sequence Flows.
  • Editable OutputShips polished diagrams with shareable links — ready for team review and iteration.
  • Auto LayoutClean positioning and routing. Zero manual cleanup required.
Finance
Online
04 —

Finance

Finance Coordinator

Tracks every deadline, filing, and obligation the business owes — quarterly taxes, payroll, 1099s, custom accruals. Delegates work to the right operator and hunts it down until it's closed out. Nothing slips.

— Capabilities

  • Deadline TrackingQuarterly taxes, annual filings, payroll cycles, and custom obligations — all on one timeline.
  • Smart DelegationAssigns items to the right person (accountant, bookkeeper, operator) with live status tracking.
  • Overdue RadarAuto-flags anything past due and surfaces it with urgency-coded alerts.
  • Proactive RemindersPings the right person at the right time — before deadlines turn into emergencies.
  • Calendar-IntegratedEvery obligation lands on the unified dashboard with color-coded urgency.
  • Natural Language Q&AAsk about any deadline or task. Get a plain-English answer instantly.
Client Success
Online
05 —

Client Success

CRM & Relationship Manager

A relationship-grade CRM running in the background of every engagement. Pipeline stages, recurring deliverables, follow-ups, invoice cycles — all tracked with context, so every client conversation picks up exactly where the last one left off.

— Capabilities

  • Pipeline VisibilityFull-funnel view across Prospect, Active, Paused, and Churned stages.
  • Obligation TrackingWeekly deliverables, monthly invoices, quarterly reviews — never miss a commitment.
  • Interaction HistoryCalls, emails, proposals, and meetings logged with automated follow-up reminders.
  • Relationship InsightsNatural-language Q&A over the entire client relationship history.
Marketing
Online
06 —

Marketing

Content & Growth Engine

A content-ops co-pilot that turns every talk, tutorial, and long-form asset into fuel for the brand. Feed it a video, a talk, a long-form drop — Marketing extracts the narrative, ready to re-cut into threads, newsletters, posts, and campaigns.

— Capabilities

  • Transcript ExtractionFull-resolution transcripts with precise timestamps for surgical clip sourcing.
  • Metadata CaptureTitle, author, duration, view count, thumbnails, and upload context — all pulled automatically.
  • Structured OutputContent drops cleanly into workspaces for editing, tagging, and repurposing.
  • Repurpose EngineRaw material becomes blog posts, social threads, newsletters, and campaign copy.
Business Success
Online
07 —

Business Success

Growth & Strategy Advisor

The strategy and ops engine behind Tech Stack Playbook® itself. Tracks growth initiatives, competitive intel, hiring plans, and internal tooling — prioritizing what's critical, flagging what's at risk, and shipping weekly reviews that keep the agency compounding.

— Capabilities

  • Initiative TrackingRevenue targets, growth milestones, hiring plans, product bets — all in one lens.
  • Priority FrameworkCRITICAL / HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW — urgent items surface first with color-coded urgency.
  • Competitive IntelligenceLog and organize competitor moves, market trends, and tool evaluations in real time.
  • Task CoordinationBreak initiatives into assigned, tracked, and closed-out tasks with clear ownership.
  • Weekly BriefingsDaily morning digests and Friday strategic reviews — never lose the thread.
  • Capacity Gap AnalysisCross-references initiatives with team capacity to surface hiring and skill needs.
Engineer
Online
08 —

Engineer

Autonomous Development Swarm

A parallel swarm of engineering agents that spin up feature branches, scaffold services, and ship production-grade work around the clock. Spawns on demand for any client project, self-coordinates across repos, and defers to humans at the decisions that actually matter — while the drafting, testing, and refactor grunt work runs overnight.

— Capabilities

  • Parallel SwarmDozens of agents spawn simultaneously to tackle features, migrations, and bug sweeps across the full stack.
  • Branch AutomationAuto-creates feature branches, drafts commits, and opens scoped PRs — ready for human review.
  • Human-in-the-LoopEngineers own architectural decisions and merges; the swarm owns everything else.
  • Cross-Repo CoordinationTracks dependencies across services so changes in one repo don't silently break another.
  • 24/7 OperationRuns continuously for clients — overnight progress, weekend coverage, zero context-switching cost.
  • Stack-Aware ScaffoldingBootstraps new services, modules, and infra from templates calibrated to the target stack.
  • Test-First DisciplineWrites and runs tests alongside every change, surfacing regressions before they reach a reviewer.
04 / The Partners

The ecosystems we're certified to build on.

Official partner status across the platforms that power modern software — giving clients direct access to technical resources, roadmap visibility, and shared accountability.

Ready to build something worth shipping?

Book a strategy call and we'll map the shortest path from where you are to a production-grade system.

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