Operations & Technical Leadership
Operations and technical leadership for large, complex environments.
25+ years in operations, reliability, capacity planning, and cross-functional delivery. At Comcast I held director and senior director roles for 13 years, including nine years running reliability operations for a high-scale video platform distributed across regional and national data centers, serving millions of weekly streams, through Comcast’s move from coax to IP streaming.
Open to full-time Director and Senior Director roles in operations, technical operations, and program management.
- 25+ yrs
- in technology operations
- 13 yrs
- Comcast director & senior director roles
- 10 yrs
- leading remote teams across U.S. time zones and overseas
Where I’ve led
Career
Experience
Founder
- Greenside Live puts a private club’s golf day on every member’s phone as it happens: live video from the course, live scoring for casual games, and real-time results, with the same feed on the clubhouse TV.
- Built it end to end (app, web admin, and on-course hardware) and run the business, from club onboarding to event-day support.
2022 – Present
M-LAB
El Dorado Hills, CA
Founder / Technical Consultant
- Started as a planned maker space and grew into a small prototyping and reverse-engineering lab, run end to end: planning, production, quality, suppliers, and fulfillment.
- Reverse-engineered and redesigned parts that fail in everyday products, including camp-chair end caps, CNC dust-collection arms, and a hard-to-find Mercedes headrest pin. The redesigned chair caps are now the main product, sold through M-LAB’s own store to customers across the US and Canada.
- Built bespoke IoT devices to monitor plastic sheet pressing, prototyped a vision system to catch CNC machining defects, ran a 3D print farm, made custom metal golf ball markers, and supplied recycled HDPE plastics to maker spaces and schools across the US.
2022
Comcast
Remote, distributed teams
Senior Director, Engineering (Video On-Demand Advertising)
- Directed the engineering organization delivering millions of VOD advertisements daily across Comcast and syndication partners.
- Delivered mission-critical software releases four months ahead of schedule.
- Transitioned code ownership of the advertising platform from an overseas team to my own team, so we could manage, update, and deploy it independently, which sped up delivery and simplified the organization.
2020 – 2022
Comcast
Remote, distributed teams
Senior Director, Engineering (Tools)
- Unified and restructured multiple engineering teams under coordinated operating objectives.
- Applied value-stream mapping, Pareto, and fishbone analysis to target high-impact process issues.
- Replaced spreadsheet-driven channel-lineup provisioning with an application that stored local, regional, and national stream configurations, validated each change, and recorded who made it and when. Designed the system, secured funding from Finance, then drove adoption across teams and trained them.
2018 – 2020
Comcast
Remote, distributed teams
Director, Engineering (IP Video Capacity Engineering)
- Led a hybrid organization of engineers, analysts, and data scientists responsible for infrastructure performance and capacity planning.
- Built dashboards that showed disk usage proactively and predicted growth, triggering scale-out before capacity ran short and flagging likely drive failures before they happened.
- Partnered with Finance to align capital planning with business growth and improve budget accuracy.
2009 – 2018
Comcast
Sacramento, CA, then remote
Director, Engineering (IP Video Site Reliability Engineering)
- Ran operations for a high-scale video platform distributed across regional and national data centers, serving millions of weekly streams and DVR playbacks.
- My teams were on the front line of moving Comcast video from local and regional coax-based delivery to the IP streaming platform Comcast now licenses to other operators, including the rebranded deployments for Cox Communications in the U.S. and Rogers, Shaw, and Vidéotron in Canada.
- Led the national top-tier escalation team, the last support tier before software development. Owned every outage, its postmortem, and the corrective actions, including public-safety-critical services such as Emergency Alert System (EAS) delivery, working daily with network operations, customer care, software development, and Comcast’s in-house CDN team.
- Served as the deployment team for new platform capabilities: planned each launch with program and product managers, then supported it in production.
- Created self-healing automation and incident-management protocols that reduced mean time to recovery.
- Managed vendors including MediaKind, UCS server and storage hardware, third-party colocation data centers, and talent sourcing.
2018 – 2020
The Aid Station
Auburn, CA
Co-founder & Co-owner (side business)
- Co-founded a trail running store and beer bar with one partner, built from scratch in Auburn, home of the Western States 100, with a staff of about five.
- Opened every vendor account from zero, including Salomon, New Balance, Altra, Topo Athletic, Black Diamond, Ultimate Direction, Drymax, and goodr, plus custom-branded store gear.
- Ran the beer bar on local breweries and hosted weekly Thursday trail runs for 10–30 runners.
- Hosted live podcast coverage of the Western States 100 from the store. Exited in 2020.
Governance
Executive Chair, Golf Committee, Cameron Park Country Club
Feb 2026 – Present
Volunteer leadership working with club management on operations, events, member experience, and improvement priorities.
Member, Finance Committee, Cameron Park Country Club
2022 – 2024
Reviewed the club’s budget in an advisory role to the chair of finance.
Earlier career
TVWorks, Senior Engineering Manager (2006–2009). MetaTV, Senior Systems Engineer (2002–2006), responsible for the local headend and software systems. Liberate Technologies, Senior Systems Engineer (2000–2002). In 2005 MetaTV was acquired by TVWorks, a Comcast and Cox venture. When TVWorks became wholly owned by Comcast in 2009, I joined Comcast as a leader and subject-matter expert for the interactive TV platform. I gave product demonstrations of the platform at all three companies.
B.S., Computer Science, Stevenson University · Six Sigma Black Belt · AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (2023, expired)
Leadership
How I lead operations
Reliability at scale
Nine years responsible for a production environment serving millions of weekly streams, through the platform’s move from coax to IP streaming and its rollout to partner operators. Incident management, recovery automation, service-level reporting, and regular operational reviews.
Lean process improvement
Lean thinking applied to real problems: value stream mapping, Pareto and fishbone analysis, and root-cause work on engineering workflows at Comcast and on production at M-LAB.
Planning and budgeting
Built capacity forecasts and dashboards, and worked with Finance to tie capital plans to business growth.
Cross-functional partnership
Worked daily with program and product managers, network operations, customer care, and software development. My teams deployed new platform capabilities, planning each launch with product and program managers and then running it in production, and were the final escalation point for national outages, owning the postmortems and corrective actions. I was the one who explained how our systems worked in terms that mattered to each person’s role, from executives to care teams.
Vendors and partners
Managed vendors across the video pipeline and infrastructure (MediaKind, UCS server and storage hardware, third-party colocation data centers, talent sourcing) and worked directly with Cox, Rogers, Shaw, and Vidéotron on their platform deployments.
Leading distributed teams
Ten years leading Comcast organizations remotely across U.S. time zones and overseas, through regular travel and remote management: up to about 45 full-time staff (managers, senior engineers, and analysts reporting to me) plus as many as 15 contractors. Restructured and consolidated teams across locations, set shared objectives, and delivered a mission-critical release four months early.
Brian Valle
Operations & Technical Leader · Founder, M-LAB
Sacramento · Northern California
About
About Brian Valle
I’ve worked in technology operations for more than 25 years and led teams for the last 20. At Comcast I spent nine years running reliability operations for the IP video platform, then led capacity engineering, then held senior director roles over engineering organizations for internal tools and video on-demand advertising. For my last ten years there I worked remotely, leading organizations of up to about 45 people across U.S. time zones and overseas.
In each role my job was to make a large operation run predictably: set clear objectives, measure the right things, run postmortems, plan capacity and budget against business growth, and make sure teams knew what they owned.
I’ve also built businesses outside my day job. From 2018 to 2020 I co-owned The Aid Station, a trail running store and beer bar in Auburn that my partner and I started from scratch. Since 2022 I’ve run M-LAB, a small product and technology business in El Dorado Hills, where I handle planning, production, quality, suppliers, and delivery myself. In 2025 I founded Greenside Live, a live engagement platform for private golf clubs. I also chair the Golf Committee at Cameron Park Country Club.
I’m looking for a Director or Senior Director role leading operations or programs.
Contact
Email is the best way to reach me. My résumé has the full details.