INTELLIGENT DATA  ·  INTUITIVE DESIGN  ·  INFORMED DECISIONS

A Pragmatic
Product Architect/Engineer

Software architect + engineer + product builder. Two startups, a Fox Sports acquisition, and over 20 years of building secure, scalable systems for the moment, implementing low-drag CI/CD workflows to keep engineering humming, and recognizing when product or business changes require a shift in architecture.

My work experienceGet in touch
20+
YEARS SHIPPING SOFTWARE
2
STARTUPS FOUNDED & BUILT
1
ACQUISITION BY FOX SPORTS
4+
NETWORKS COVERAGE

WORK SEEN ON   ESPN · NFL NETWORK · FOX SPORTS · CBS · MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL · SUPER BOWL · OLYMPICS

01 / PROCAST TIMELINE

One product.
Evolutionary architecture.

Gridiron Grunts started with a focused premise: give professional football players a direct voice and a way to monetize it. What we learned opened a much larger opportunity, and the architecture was built to follow it. This is product architecture in practice: learn from the market, be agile in architecture to react quickly, pivot without losing the core, and evolve the system as the opportunities become real.

From ideation to acquisition I designed, built, and grew our on-prem back-end service architecture from monolith to an AWS cloud-based, event-driven content pipeline with a custom back-end CMS and API that powered our mobile app. The flexible architecture allowed us to scale quickly and easily pivot from fan-facing subscription service to near-real-time live broadcast integration and integrated livestreaming features for producers to remotely facilitate celebrity interviews.

on-air (live)
  1. 2010 · THE FIRST PRODUCT Gridiron Grunts Athlete voice, direct fan connection, and a focused path to monetization.
  2. 2012 · THE VIDEO PIVOT StraightCast Mobile-to-broadcast video used across ESPN, NFL Network, CBS, FOX, Monday Night Football, and Fox Sports' "On The Bus."
  3. BEYOND FOOTBALL Every sport, every screen UFC, MLB, MLS, the Olympics: the system's range proved out on the biggest stages in sports.
  4. 2015+ · ACQUISITION Fox Sports ProCast The startup product became part of a major sports media platform. Chief architect and sole backend engineer, end to end.
  • AWS
  • .NET
  • C#
  • MVC
  • JavaScript
  • ESB/NServiceBus
  • RabbitMQ
  • Lambda
  • S3
  • EC2
  • SQL Server
  • FFMPEG
  • Live Streaming
  • Studio Integration
  • Hardware Integration
  • Wowza Streaming Engine
  • Java
  • Startup
02 / IMPACT IN PRODUCTION

Continuous architecture: Incremental change, no risky rewrites.

Built for the business: the people and processes using it, not the theoretical. Shipped to Super Bowl broadcasts and oil refineries. Only one of them sent thank-you notes.

Digital Ridge site banner
steamboatchamber.com, built on the Digital Ridge platform
sosoutreach.org, built on the Digital Ridge platform
Digital Ridge logo and tagline
DIGITAL RIDGE · AGENCY · CO-FOUNDER

One content foundation, multiple digital experiences.

Clients in a predicament with a ticking clock. A trusted provider changing hands. A business restructuring. We had already built, operated, and maintained many of their sites. Co-founded a digital agency and built a SOLR-based Content-as-a-Service platform that decoupled delivery from CMS systems like Umbraco and WordPress, backed by multi-zone AWS infrastructure serving hosting, CI/CD, CRM, and billing.  Clients migrated. Business continuity delivered.

  • AWS
  • .NET
  • C#
  • MVC
  • JavaScript
  • Webhooks
  • CMS
  • SOLR/Lucene
  • S3
  • EC2
  • CDN
  • SQL Server
  • Startup
  • Hosting
  • Website Development
  • Biz Dev
99.99% uptime SLA
Near-real-time coke drum integrity and reliability dashboard
OIL & GAS · ANALYTICS · ARCHITECT/ENG

From monthly spreadsheets to near-real-time decisions.

Data was trapped in PDF format. Engineers spent hours painstakingly cut and pasting CSVs and (brilliant) Excel formula/reliability output to generate a static (unwieldy) monthly report. I designed an ETL process to pull the data into a SQL database, moved the engineering analytics to automated processes, and built a near-real-time coke drum integrity/reliability monitoring dashboard for refinery clients. Produced a solution that converted a laborious Excel-driven, billable-hour monthly service into a recurring, easily operated, higher-value offering potential for critical refinery equipment.

  • .NET
  • C#
  • MVC
  • JavaScript
  • CSV
  • SFTP
  • SQL Server
  • ETL
  • SSRS
  • Excel
  • SQLite
  • SharePoint
5× client capacity, same staff
Asset-recovery SaaS platform, monolith to distributed
ASSET RECOVERY · SAAS · ENGINEER/MGR

Monolith to distributed, improved automated testing ... modernization without stopping the business.

Performance issues. A legacy monolithic web app. I introduced a distributed architecture to slice the monolith, and assisted in incrementally moving a large multi-tenant .NET Framework SaaS platform to .NET Core and Blazor while adding automated testing, CI/CD quality gates, and designing acquisition data migrations that erased hundreds of manual hours at a B2B provider for the auto-finance industry.

  • Azure
  • .NET Core
  • .NET Framework
  • C#
  • ASP.NET
  • Blazor
  • ESB/NServiceBus
  • RabbitMQ
  • SQL Server
  • ETL
  • WCF
  • REST
  • SOAP
0 big-bang rewrites required
03 / CONTINUOUS ARCHITECTURE

Product thinking. Architectural discipline.

The right architecture fits the opportunity now and offers agility as the business or market changes.

  1. 01
    Start with the product decision Understand the customer, the business model, the operating environment, and what must be learned next.
  2. 02
    Build for the moment Choose the smallest credible architecture that delivers value without manufacturing tomorrow's constraints.
  3. 03
    Earn the complexity Scale reliability, data, teams, and infrastructure when real demand, not imagined demand, justifies it.
  4. 04
    Use AI like a power tool AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Copilot, Codex) woven into daily delivery: faster iterations, better coverage, with a human accountable for every decision.
  5. 05
    Stay close to the software Use code, prototypes, tests, observability, and production feedback to keep strategy connected to reality.
04 / CLOUD DEMOS

Working software, documented.

Purpose-built demo applications that expose the product premise, the architecture, the trade-offs, and the delivery decisions behind them. Both are live; click through.

WeatherDemo.com dashboard

WeatherDemo.com

LIVE

Real-time environmental telemetry without permanent cloud overhead: event-driven ingestion, historical storage, and time-series visualization designed to sleep when nobody is watching.

  • Azure
  • .NET
  • Vue
  • time-series
Architecture Design Cost Delivery
mysitemapper.com screenshot

MySiteMapper.com

LIVE

Field deliverables transformed into operational spatial information: asynchronous ingestion, replaceable persistence, geospatial visualization, and local-to-cloud parity for infrastructure decisions.

  • Azure
  • .NET
  • Angular
  • spatial
Architecture Design Cost
05 / ABOUT

Brice Cave

20+ years of building software people actually use, across two startups (one as co-founder and one as sole architect and cloud engineer), and industries ranging from oil & gas, transportation, and financial services to live sports broadcasting, hospitality, and healthcare. That breadth is the point: the pattern that saves a refinery millions often started life in a broadcast pipeline.

Texas A&M graduate, and a former member of the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band, where I learned that precision at scale is a team sport. I still believe the best systems, like the best formations, look effortless because someone sweated the details.

LinkedIn
06 / START A CONVERSATION

Building your next big thing?

I help teams connect product judgment, software architecture, and delivery, especially when the opportunity is real but the path forward is not yet obvious.

LinkedIn