3 years ago

Category: Software, Business, Database, Data, Kubernetes, Infrastructure, github, artificial-intelligence

Jacob Scott is an experienced engineer and enthusiastic participant in the resilience engineering community, having spent time caring for the technology systems powering high-growth startups as well as unicorns like Lyft and Stripe. Blameless SRE Darrell Pappa recently interviewed Jacob to delve into how his research has informed his career journey and experiences to-date, especially in his latest role at Stripe where he helps operate the economic infrastructure of the Internet.

The interesting challenge now, and one that I’m interested to see manifest in my job at Stripe, is how to take that perspective and map it to success in how to evaluate a process or outcome, in actual systems.

A pattern that I would hypothesize that is frequent for high growth companies, any Decacorn in the Precambrian era, is that your business is exploding and you have five people on the infrastructure team, and then it’s just “hook or crook” it.

If you think about the concrete path that connects this philosophy or perspective to clear outcomes, in the same way that shipping a new feature is a clear outcome, it is very context-specific.