About Me
I'm Clay Levering — an engineering leader and infrastructure architect based in Los Angeles. For over fifteen years, I've been building backend systems, optimizing databases, and architecting media processing pipelines that handle real scale. Not "scale" as a buzzword — terabytes-of-video-content-monthly scale.
My path into tech wasn't the typical CS degree route. I started as an Electrician's Mate on the USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63), where I learned that complex systems don't care about your excuses — they either work or they don't. That mindset stuck. After the Navy, I earned my degree in Business Administration while transitioning into product management, eventually finding my way back to the technical work I'd always gravitated toward.
Engineering Philosophy
I believe in measurable outcomes over theoretical elegance. Performance metrics, cost optimization, and developer velocity aren't just nice-to-haves — they're how you know your architecture actually works.
I've driven initiatives that identified $180K+ in annual AWS savings while still massively optimizing the applications themselves (in some cases with 99% performance increases). Numbers matter.
Whether I'm tuning MySQL queries across millions of rows, building video transcoding workflow services, or architecting multi-tenant Laravel applications for Fortune 500 clients, my focus is the same: build systems that scale, maintain teams that ship, and solve problems that impact the bottom line.
Career Arc
Navy → Sonos → Product Management → Software Architecture → Engineering Leadership. Each step taught me something the others couldn't. The Navy taught me systems thinking under pressure. Sonos taught me how to build community and ship consumer products. Product management taught me to prioritize ruthlessly. And now I get to combine all of it — leading engineering teams that build real infrastructure for the media and entertainment industry.
Currently I lead the product engineering team at Blu Digital Group, where we build the software that powers the digital supply chain for some of the biggest names in entertainment. Before that, I architected content services at Pluto TV during its hypergrowth phase.
What Drives Me
I'm energized by the intersection of infrastructure and product — understanding not just how to build something, but why it matters to the business. There's real satisfaction in taking a choking production app and making it run in milliseconds, or in designing a pipeline that handles hundreds of thousands of transcodes monthly without drama.
I'm also deeply invested in open source — I maintain claxxon-lint (my opinionated ESLint config), built a Node.js Sonarr API wrapper, and contribute to the Vue/Nuxt ecosystem.
Beyond the Terminal
When I'm not neck-deep in CloudWatch logs or writing Terraform, you'll find me in the kitchen. I'm an avid cook and my wife is an aspiring professional baker (Tammy Levering). Our house basically smells like your favorite brunch spot at all times.