I’m Brent West. You work with me, start to finish.
Twenty years in technology. I started in systems assurance and QA — finding what’s broken before customers do — spent years as a software engineer at venture-backed startups, and moved into engineering leadership, most recently as an Engineering Lead at Gecko Robotics.
West Works Innovations is where I do that work directly for the people who own the business, without an agency in between.
What I’ve done
- Built Gecko Robotics' data platform from scratch — greenfield, no template, structural decisions you live with for years. I was one of the first six engineers hired when a new Director of Software rebuilt the organization, and led the team of five behind that platform.
- Owned the rendering service behind 150M+ emails a day as a staff engineer at Bluecore. Moving the team to test-driven development cut Black Friday and Cyber Monday defects by 90%.
- Built production retrieval systems — RAG on Vertex AI and Pinecone — that answer questions from a company's own documents and data.
- At OppenheimerFunds, responsible for the reliability and uptime of mission-critical financial systems managing $200B+ in assets.
- Senior backend engineer and people manager at Intent before that — hired, managed, and been accountable for what software teams shipped.
- Built and run my own software, including the forecasting tool for my franchise.
Why I do this
Most of the people I work with are excellent at their actual business and have been failed by software twice: once by a no-code tool that couldn’t grow with them, and once by an agency that quoted a number with no relationship to reality.
There’s a real gap between “$500 template” and “$75,000 agency retainer.” That gap is where most good businesses live. That’s who I build for.
I’ve been on your side of the table
I’m not only a consultant. I’m opening a franchise — I’ve negotiated the lease, signed the personal guaranty, and been through the SBA loan conditions. When the numbers had to be right, I built the software to model them myself.
So I know what it’s like to write a five-figure check to a technical person and hope they’re telling you the truth.
How I work
You get me.
I scope it, I build it, I answer the phone.
The number comes before the work.
Written scope, line-item pricing, milestones. It doesn't move unless you ask it to.
I'll tell you when the answer is no.
If custom software isn't what you need, I'd rather say so on the first call.
I won't oversell you.
Not on scope, not on timeline, not on what I've done.
You own everything.
Code, data, hosting, documentation. If we part ways, you lose nothing.