Headshot of Brian Davidson

Brian Davidson

Senior Customer Engineer, Google Maps Platform

About

I'm a customer engineer and technical educator with 8+ years of experience helping enterprise engineering teams adopt developer platforms across mapping, identity, and cloud.

I build working demos and open-source tooling, teach engineers through workshops and conference talks, and use Claude Code on both personal and work projects.

My foundation is in cartography (M.S., UW–Madison) and identity and access management (Okta), which still shapes how I think about cloud and AI security.

Projects

  • TIME Person of the Year app, showing the title page and a world map shaded by how many honorees each country has produced

    TIME Person of the Year

    A React and D3 app, built with Claude Code, for exploring every TIME Person of the Year honoree from 1927 to 2025. It pairs a sortable table with five interactive charts: a world map by country, a streamgraph of categories over time, a timeline of the honor's wording, an age-at-honor beeswarm, and repeat honorees.

  • Google Maps Platform Postman collection

    An open-source collection I lead. It won Postman's 2025 Top New API award, with 95K+ views and 1.1K+ forks.

  • Rapid Deploy

    Formerly Quick Launch: an open-source drag-and-drop dashboard for situational-awareness apps that need little to no code, published at Mapbox.

  • Hootenanny UI

    Front-end development (2016–2017) on the open-source web interface for Hootenanny, a vector map-data conflation tool built on the OpenStreetMap iD editor.

Teaching & Speaking

  • Speaker on API adoption strategy at Postman's API GTM conference and SF Tech Week (2025)
  • Led 10+ hands-on technical workshops for enterprise engineering teams
  • Co-founder and mentor, PreSales Collective DC chapter (2021–2024)
  • Graduate teaching assistant for Introduction to Cartography at UW–Madison; Olmstead Departmental Award for Outstanding Teaching Assistant

Experience

  • Senior Customer Engineer, Google2022–present
  • Lead Enterprise Solutions Engineer, Okta2020–2022
  • Enterprise & Government Solutions Engineer, Mapbox2018–2020
  • UX Engineer, Esri2017–2018
  • UI/UX Developer, DigitalGlobe2014–2017
  • Cartographer, University of Wisconsin–Madison2012–2014

Education

  • M.S., Cartography and GIS, University of Wisconsin–Madison Read my thesis (PDF) 2014
  • B.A., Geography, University of South Carolina2012

Awards