Marcus Desmond Brooks

Co-founder & COO at Yarrow Studio · HR software

Yarrow Studio

Washington, DC · ET (UTC-5)

12+ years experience

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

English

Messaging unavailable

Overview

Building Yarrow Studio in Washington - HR software. Grew the team to 112 people across 5 countries. Before that: Salesforce and Ford. Most at home with SaaS and payroll.

Good reasons to reach out

Early customers and design partners
Thoughtful intros to people in my field

Please don't message about

Offshore staffing offers
Crypto token projects
Fundraising consultants

Slower in the last week of each quarter

Skills

salesSaaSpayrollHR tech

Experience

Co-founder & COO
Apr 2025 - Present
Yarrow Studio · 1 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Washington, DC
- Grew the team to 27 people across 3 countries.
- Raised $37 million across 2 rounds.
Staff Platform Engineer
Oct 2022 - Apr 2025
Salesforce · 2 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Washington, DC
- Brought on-call pages for search down from 26 a week to 3.
Backend Engineer
Jan 2019 - Oct 2022
Ford · 3 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Washington, DC
- Shipped 18 launches on the product security team without a rollback.
- Cut p99 latency on the product security services from 479ms to 134ms.
Staff Software Engineer
Aug 2016 - Jan 2019
Uber · 2 yr 5 mo · Full-time · Washington, DC
- Built the experimentation framework 22 product teams use to ship changes safely.
Senior Android Engineer
Feb 2015 - Aug 2016
Meta · 1 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Washington, DC
- Brought on-call pages for payments platform down from 40 a week to 3.
- Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 26% in two quarters.

Projects

Write-up: HR software in practice

2026

A long-form guide to HR software for people starting out.

References

No references yet.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
BS, Computer Science
2009 - 2013

Details

Compensation expectations

What they are targeting for their next role.

Visible to connections

Direct contact details

Direct email and a scheduling link.