I started my career as an engineer working on distributed systems at Informix, building an agent-based messaging layer between Java services and C++ database servers. At the time, making these systems communicate reliably felt almost impossible. There were no established patterns, and I was working directly with formats, protocols, cross-language boundaries I had never encountered before. Getting even a simple request–response path working felt like a real breakthrough.

That experience reshaped how I think about technical problems. It taught me to approach systems from first principles, to stay comfortable with large unknowns, and to assume that constraints can often be pushed much further than they initially appear. In the process, I developed a deep understanding of how distributed systems actually behave beneath their abstractions—knowledge that has continued to guide my work as systems scale.

Since then, my work has focused on scaling production infrastructure and the organizations that build it. At Google, I helped launch Google Cloud’s first production region and led a multi-year, Google diskless ~$500M program to remove spinning disks from all production data centers, upgrading millions of machines across the fleet. I also scaled Census from a small API into Google’s default production observability system, enabling safe, low-overhead metrics for millions of jobs—work that later became OpenTelemetry. Along the way, I drove several enterprise launches, including Vault, Postini log search, and Audio Ads.

At VMware, I built and scaled execution capacity for the Tanzu platform by hiring and onboarding 25 TPMs across four countries while continuing to operate as an individual contributor. I partnered closely with the Tanzu Architecture Group and engineering teams to ship Kubernetes control-plane and platform capabilities across Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu Mission Control, Tanzu Advanced, including regulated & federal environments. In parallel, I led a cross-company effort across five business units that replaced siloed ownership with shared problem-solving, enabling teams to cooperate on systemic execution issues rather than optimize locally.

More recently at Airbnb, I ran company-scale infrastructure programs, including the largest service-mesh migration in the company’s history, & led cross-company architecture efforts to reduce tribal knowledge & improve incident response