Brandon Odom
Software Engineer
brandon.david.odom@gmail.com
(228) 493-6366
Austin, Texas
brandonodom.com
Professional Experience
Fullstack Software Engineer
Nov 2024 - PresentFreelance
- Leading the end-to-end website redesign for a B2B industrial metal products company as the sole engineer and designer, replacing an outdated legacy platform
- Designing the full user experience and a modern, responsive interface from scratch
- Building a searchable product catalog with technical specifications and direct online ordering
- Creating quote-request and contact forms that route customer inquiries to the sales team
- Integrating a headless CMS so the business can manage products and content without a developer
Software Development Engineer
Sept 2019 - Jul 2022Amazon Web Services
- Became AWS CodeStar's primary engineer in just five months, maintaining the live service through patches and version upgrades
- Created and maintained 40+ project templates that helped CodeStar users bootstrap new projects
- Served as CodeStar's org-wide point of contact, fielding functionality, compliance, and security questions from teams across Amazon
- Contributed to CodeCatalyst, CodeStar's successor, influencing blueprint design and building internal tooling
- Partnered with the region-build team to expand CodeStar to an additional AWS region
- Resolved critical security issues and maintained runbooks, scripts, and wikis while serving in the on-call rotation
Graduate Research Assistant
Jan 2016 - Dec 2017Student Worker
May 2014 - Dec 2015Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems
- Built the ANVEL-ROS bridge, exchanging video, sensor data, and control commands between the ROS framework and the ANVEL simulator in real time
- Validated ANVEL's simulation accuracy by running identical commands on a physical robot and its digital twin
- Designed user interfaces for human-factors studies on robot teleoperation, measuring how different designs affected operator performance
IT Intern
May 2012 - Jul 2012; May 2013 - Jul 2013St. Stanislaus College
- Set up a computer lab from scratch, cloning drives and standardizing configurations across every machine
- Upgraded hardware and software across lab, teacher, and faculty computers campus-wide
- Onboarded teachers onto the PowerGrade grading system, creating and configuring their accounts
Skills
Development
TypeScriptJavaScriptPythonJavaC++ReactNext.jsHTML5CSSTailwindNode.jsAPI DevelopmentE-commerceROS
Cloud & DevOps
AWSCloudFormationCI/CDDockerVercelDigital OceanSecurityOn-CallAgile/Scrum
Tools & Services
LLMsGitHeadless CMSAlgoliaVS CodeIntelliJ IDEA
Design & Research
UI DesignUX DesignPrototypingUser ResearchHuman Factors
Education
MS in Computer Science · Artificial Intelligence
2015 - 2017Mississippi State University
- Master's Project, "Therabot UI": designed and built a human-friendly interface for Therabot, a robotic therapy dog for children
- Researched under Prof. Cindy Bethel, co-authoring peer-reviewed publications
- Completed a directed study with Prof. Chris Archibald, migrating the database and modernizing his CueCard pool simulator to a current Python release
BS in Computer Science · Minor in Cognitive Science
2011 - 2015Mississippi State University
- Member of the Social, Therapeutic, and Robotic Systems Lab (STaRS Lab)
Publications
"Therabot™: A Robotic Support Companion"
Darrow, Sarah, Aaron Kimbrell, Nikhil Lokhande, Nicholas Dinep-Schneider, T. J. Ciufo, Brandon Odom, Zachary Henkel, and Cindy L. Bethel. "Therabot™: A Robotic Support Companion." In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 37-37. ACM, 2018.
"ANVEL-ROS: The integration of the robot operating system with a high-fidelity simulator."
Hudson, Christopher R., Alexander Lalejini, Brandon Odom, Cindy L. Bethel, Daniel W. Carruth, Phillip J. Durst, and Christopher Goodin. "ANVEL-ROS: The integration of the robot operating system with a high-fidelity simulator." In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium, p. 378. 2015.