About

I am an SRE, Engineering Leadership practitioner and Coach based in Dublin, Ireland.

Most recently, I was VP of Engineering at Twilio, working on reliability strategery and leading the SRE group there.

Previous to that, I was Sr. Director of Engineering at elastic.co, building and scaling Elastic Cloud.

I was a Site Reliability Engineer/Manager/Director at Google from 2004 to 2021. As well as technical and management/leadership work on products such as GMail and Google Analytics, I was the global lead for Storage and Databases SRE at Google, as well as the head of Engineering at Google Ireland for several years.

I hold various opinions about technology, building and keeping teams and organisations, the role of SRE/Devops/whatever the kool kids are calling it, and various other things. I have run orgs from individual teams up to orgs of 300+ engineers, managers and other functions.

I was responsible for the first and second Reddit AMAs participated in by SRE, and have given various talks, presentations, etc. externally about what Google Engineering, and specifically SRE, do. I'm the author of chapter 29 of the SRE Book.

Speaking/Interviewing

I am happy to speak on subjects such as Software Resiliency, Customer Management for SaaS (internal and external), SRE history and development, OKRs, Managing Distributed Teams, Performance Management, Coaching high-level engineers and managers, Interrupts, on-call, incident management, and anything else that falls inside the realm of interesting and where I might have something interesting to say.

If in doubt, get in contact via LinkedIn or Mastodon or any of the various ways that can be figured out.

Previous Talks, Panels and Interviews (an incomplete list):

Writing

Most of my writings can be found on this site -- many of these are vetted versions of papers/essays I wrote for various employers (but, mostly Google) and are used internally there.

Links: - Linkedin - Mastodon - GitHub