After 17 years building SRE teams at Google and serving as the Site Lead for Engineering in Dublin, Dave joined Elastic as the Sr Director of Engineering and later VP of Engineering at Twilio. Following a recent career break, Dave now divides his time between coaching engineering leaders and consulting to help busy teams be more effective. In the heart of our conversation, Dave shares the frameworks and practical tips he's amassed for making the most of the mentorship experience.   ...

At the personal request of Reid Hoffman to emerge from early retirement, David joined LinkedIn in 2009 during a period of rapid growth to help stabilize the chaos, cultivating a much-needed culture of “Site Up and Secure.” Before this, David served as SVP of Engineering and Operations at Yahoo!, overseeing their Search Marketing organization and the Production Operations infrastructure for the entire company. Throughout his career, David has held multiple leadership positions and is...

Before joining CueIn last year as a Founding Data Scientist, Melissa was a Lead Data Scientist at Salesforce working on the Einstein Platform that focused on automating Data Science workflows. In this conversation we dive into Melissa’s unique journey, what to do in the face of increasing job automation and explore the latest developments in practical AI. Segments: [00:02:13] Melissa’s background in computational neuroscience [00:06:08] 7 years at Salesforce vs startup [00:11:31] Joining...

What's it like to open source an internal project at a big tech company like LinkedIn? When should a company open source a project and what are the benefits and challenges that come along with it? If you want to open source an internal project, how should you go about advocating for it? Félix is a Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn where he works on the data infrastructure team that builds Venice. Venice is a distributed derived data store which LinkedIn open sourced in the fall of 2022. ...

Should engineers and product managers “stay in their lanes”? What big company habits should you keep vs unlearn when transitioning to working at a start-up? Could an ayahuasca retreat give you more clarity on your career goals? Ilya and Arnab join the show to share their journey quitting big tech to bootstrap a podcasting startup. Arnab and Ilya are the co-founders of Metacast. Before starting the company, Arnab was a Principal Engineer at AWS while Ilya was a Sr. Product Manager at Google...

What's "AI in a Box"? Pete Warden joins the show to share a new project he recently launched that encapulates Language Transcription/Translation and Question Answering capabilities into a wallet-sized board running locally without internet, as well as stories and learnings from building his new company, Useful Sensors, after 7 years of leading the tensorflow mobile project at Google.  Pete is the CEO of Useful Sensors. After founding his own company Jetpac and selling it to Google in 2014,...

What does it mean to change the economics of software development? Nathan Marz joins the show to share how they reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100X and the 10 years journey to build Rama, a new programming platform that made this feat possible. Nathan is the founder of Red Planet Labs. Prior to RPL, he led engineering for BackType which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Nathan created the Apache Storm project and wrote the book Big Data: Principles and best...

Kelsey Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. In this second part of the conversation, we focus on Kelsey’s retirement - the financial planning that enabled him to retire at 42, how he got started advising startups and his perspectives on compensation, turning down a substantial offer from Microsoft and meeting Satya Nadella in person. And, of course, plans for the future.

Kelsey Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. In this first part of the conversation, we delve into pivotal moments in Kelsey’s career journey ranging from buying his first car by working at mcdonald’s after school, to starting his own computer store that turned into a music studio after 6pm, to hacking on python infrastructure with the core developers. Through these stories, we learned a ton about how Kelsey thinks about acquiring new...

Julie Amundson is a Sr Staff Software Engineer at Google working on Machine Learning Infrastructure. Prior to Google, she was the Director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix. Julie decided to take a career break last year when she was affected by mass layoffs. In this conversation, we talk to her about what it was like to find a job during hiring freezes, what it was like to position herself in this market, whether the interviewers cared about the career break she took and how the...

Chris Pruett is the CTO and Co-founder of Jam - a new way to share and listen to bite-sized audio. Prior to Jam, Chris spent 9+ years at LinkedIn growing from an engineering manager to VP of Engineering. During his tenure at LinkedIn, he worked on almost all aspects of the app and towards the end, led an org of 500+ engineers working on Feed, Messaging, Identity and Search. In this episode, we discuss how he made the decision to leave his leadership position at LinkedIn and co-found Jam. We...

Short episode about reflections on the past year and plans for 2022.

Kailash is the CTO at Zerodha, the largest stock broker in India. In this conversation, we speak with him about absurdism - a philosophy that guides his personal and professional worldview. We discuss how he built Zerodha’s tech team, their team culture and how the team operates so efficiently while being so lean. We also discuss why Zerodha self-hosts all of their tech stack, what they look for when hiring engineers and how their systems scaled when the user base grew from 2 to 8 million in...

Michael Lynch is the founder of TinyPilot. After doing software engineering at Microsoft and Google for 7 years, Michael decided in 2018 to quit and start working for himself by building small software businesses. From years of negative profit to now building a $450K+ ARR hardware business, Michael joins the show to chat about what made him quit his cushy job at Google, how he builds in public with monthly retrospectives, what he has learned over the 3 years indie hacking and much more.

Cory is currently a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io. Prior to this, he led observability teams at Twitter & Stripe. We talk to him about how he got his start in customer support and the role it played in the later part of his career. We discuss his time at Twitter where there was a power outage in the data center on the day he joined. We also discuss how he created & led the observability team at Stripe, how one can succeed in a new org & what are some effective ways to advocate for...

Ashwin is a Startup Partnership Lead at Stripe. From web development to co-founding a YC startup, to deep learning, Ashwin has a knack for picking up new skills extremely quickly. In this episode, we chat about the methods he employed to successfully make these transitions, learnings/tips from winning 30+ hackathons in a row, and what engineers can gain from better story-telling.

Bruno Connelly is a VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. In this episode, we talk about his journey in tech - from teaching himself how to code to leading the SRE org at LinkedIn. We also discuss the early days at LinkedIn, building technical stability, growing the org globally and his leadership style. Website link: https://softwaremisadventures.com/bruno Music Credits: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

With 5+ years of experience building resilient systems at the Netflix scale, Lorin joins the show to chat about his favorite incident story, the path that led him to doing chaos engineering (and later away from it), and advocating for a dedicated analyst to talk to people after an incident. Throughout the conversation, Lorin shares his philosophy and tips on how to learn from incidents, what engineers can gain from writing better, and why some metrics may not be as useful as you think.

Spoons is the Co-founder and Chief Architect of Lightstep. He joins the show to talk about building systems at Google scale and various aspects that make Google a weird place than other companies. We talked about Spoons's journey of leaving Google and deciding to join Lightstep as a co-founder. We dig into the challenges during the early days of Lightstep and discuss the importance of speaking to customers to build the right product.

Having led 100+ ML projects at Insight and built ML systems at Stripe scale, Emmanuel joins the show to chat about how to build useful ML products and what happens next when the model is in production. Throughout the conversation, Manu shares stories and advice on topics like the common mistakes people make when starting a new ML project, what’s similar and different about the lifecycle of ML systems compared to traditional software, and writing a technical book.

Todd is a Sr Director of Engineering at Google where he leads Site Reliability Engineering teams for Machine Learning. Having recently presented on how ML breaks in production at Google, Todd joins the show to chat about why many ways that ML systems break in production have nothing to do with ML, what’s different about engineering reliable systems for ML, vs traditional software (and the many ways that they are similar), what he looks for when hiring ML SREs, and more.

Evan Estola is a Director of Engineering at Flatiron Health where he's leading software engineering teams focused on building Machine Learning products. Throughout this episode, Evan shares various stories when recommendation systems didn’t work as expected, like this one time when members saw mathematically worst recommendations for meetups near them. We also discuss skills Evan looks for when hiring ML engineers, giving constructive feedback and much more.

Uma is a VP of Engineering at Render. In this episode, she shared with us her insights on how to successfully manage infrastructure migrations. We discussed the importance of communicating the "why" behind a migration, identifying success metrics, creating a culture where migrations are identified as highly impactful projects and much more.

Charity Majors (https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io. In this lively conversation, we learned about her journey from being an engineer to co-founding Honeycomb, what it was like being on-call when she was only 17, various production outages and how to stay calm under pressure. Charity also shares what it takes to build an awesome engineering culture, the engineer/manager pendulum, and qualities Charity looks for when hiring senior engineers.

Tammy Bryant Butow is a Principal SRE at Gremlin where she works on Chaos Engineering. In this episode, we discuss an outage where a core switch took down half the datacenter, her experience running a disaster recovery test and how it taught her about the importance of injecting failures into a system to make it more resilient. We talk about chaos engineering and advice for teams looking to get started with it.