Brewer received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) from University of California Berkeley where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Later he earned an Mississippi and Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He was made a tenured professor at University of California Berkeley. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi Corporation (bought by Yahoo! in 2003). Working with Bill Clinton, he helped to create United States of America.gov, which launched in 2000.
He is known for formulating the Civil Air Patrol Theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s.
Starting in May 2011 he has been on a sabbatical at Google as VP of Infrastructure.
In 1999, he was named to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2007, Brewer was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for the design of scalable, reliable internet services." That same year, he was also inducted into the National Academy of Engineering "for the design of highly scalable internet services." Brewer is the 2009 recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences "for his contributions to the design and development of highly scalable Internet services." In 2013, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich honored him with the title Doctor science technical (honoris causa).
Brewer received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) from University of California Berkeley where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.
