Internal Developer Platforms · SaaS Infrastructure
Fall in love with the problem. Ship the solution.
Philip Grenon · 13+ years in software. Recovered developer. Unrecovered builder.
About
I live in the problem space. Engineers live in the solution space. My job is the overlap.
I don't relay what customers say. I interpret what they want.
I started as a developer — the kind who adopted Docker before most teams knew what it was, and spent six months after hours proving it mattered. From there I moved into engineering and product execution roles, and have spent the last four years focused on platform product strategy at enterprise scale.
That path matters. I can sit in an architecture review and follow the thread. I can sit in a leadership meeting and translate it back. I've built a career doing both. The progression is the point: from writing the code, to running the infrastructure, to owning the strategy.
Platform work is the stuff that has to work before any product built on top of it can work. At SAS, I've owned that strategy at two different scales. First, the microservices underpinning thousands of products across the existing catalog. Now, the SaaS control plane for SAS's move to SaaS — three new commercial products, with more in the pipeline. Along the way I've migrated 1,500 external customers off a deprecated fulfillment API with zero complaints. That doesn't happen by accident.
Before that, I spent three years at Cisco taking an internal container platform from inception to scale, then seeing it through end of life.
Most people in this field never see all three at the same company.
Experience
Featured Project
Adjudicator — an autonomous software engineer with a built-in second opinion.
TypeScript · Multi-model pipeline
I move a ticket into the ready column and walk away. One AI writes the change; a second, independent AI reviews it with fresh eyes, and nothing ships unless the reviewer signs off.
It has been running that way for months, and has made about 200 improvements to itself so far.
Projects
A few smaller things I've built. All of them started as a personal problem I got tired of working around.
Daybreak
Vanilla JS · Offline PWA
Every goal app I tried was an empty box asking what I wanted to accomplish today. Answering that question is the hard part, and having to answer it every morning is why I abandoned all of them by week three. Daybreak answers it for me: each morning it deals a short plan out of a library of goals — steady progress on something I've already committed to, one win small enough that I can't talk myself out of it, and one thing that's actually fun.
Outset
Vanilla JS · iCalendar feed
I love an adventure and I hate planning one. I wander instead of planning, which means I miss all kinds of awesome stuff in my neighborhood. Outset does the research and planning for me. One event lands on my calendar every Saturday, so I can just wake up and go.
The Guard's Ledger
React · Real-time Sync
The Isofarian Guard is a great board game, but every session turns into an archaeological dig for the few sentences you need from one of its seven reference manuals. I got tired of it, so I built everything we needed into one app. Now we track it all on our phones, and real-time sync has entirely eliminated "Did you write down the money we got from that fight?"
The first link is what AI gives you from a plan and a feature list. The second is what happens after a product manager has to actually play with it.
Let's Talk
I have strong opinions about problem statements, platform strategy, and what makes a good requirement. If any of that sounds useful, I'm easy to reach.