I am a visual thinker. I approach abstract systems as a work of art which I can use spatial reasoning to diagnose and redesign. I’ve engineered a variety of systems ranging from an open-source chaos engineering platform to geospatial data pipelines. I’ve also worked on products such as architectural design tools and workflow management tools.
datadog
At Datadog, I support a distributed caching platform which hooks into our critical production services. Datadog is an observability service for cloud-scale applications. I think about how to build resilient distributed systems that process and visualize millions of data points every second for our customers across three global cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure).
I am passionate about learning from high-severity incidents to protect ourselves and our customers from data or service outages including coordinating sensitive migrations and operating Kubernetes workloads. I have built open-sourced chaos engineering tools to test the resilience of microservices by applying disruptions to our live clusters.
work experience
- Datadog (2020-present) – create chaos engineering and incident review culture across engineering department; build and maintain caching platform for critical data applications; execute company-wide security and infrastructure reliability programs
- CBRE Build (2018-2020) – web-based interior design product allowing fortune 500 companies like Bank of America and Coca Cola to redesign their office floor plans and render 3-dimensional demos
- Bloomberg LP (2015 – 2018) – realtime data ingestion pipeline to track live geolocations of 12,000 cargo ships around the world and deduce trade flow of Liquified Natural Gas in realtime
- Google Maps (2014 internship) – built internal street view widget for operators to more easily verify external business data curation requests
- Amazon’s trade-in store (2013 internship) – expanded business offerings for how customers can request money back once they’ve shipped in goods, primarily textbooks, to our warehouses
mentorship & leadership
- Women of Datadog – Community Guild Co-lead (2024 – present) – organize group mentorship programs, speaker series, and social events globally to build a sense of community and deliver career support for women employees at Datadog.
- Veterans Community Guild at Datadog – Guild Member (2022 – present) – host veteran-focused non-profit events at Datadog office and deliver events to Datadog employees that educate them on how to work well with active duty military service members and how to best support military veterans working in tech.
- Code Your Dreams – Associate Board Member (2023 – present) – bridge programs and volunteers across related non-profits to bring the best prison and post-prison education programs to system-impacted people
- Project Reclass – Chief Technology Officer (2019 – present) – lead engineering effort to create interactive, visual computer networking curriculum into prisons
- American Corporate Partners – Mentor (2018 – 2023) – mentor veterans and military spouses interested in transitioning into the technology industry
- Bloomberg Women in Tech – Program Coordinator (2015-2018) – organize career-focused programs for the Women-in-Tech community such as hosting a tech talks series, attending and hosting meetups or panel events in NYC, facilitating group mentoring sessions, and hosting socials for the community.
Technology Blogs
PowerToFly: Confidence
I used to get feedback that I’m “distracted” because of the strange way I solve problems. No one thinks like me, understands me, or can guide me through my own brain. That’s on me. But others can provide me tools and information along the way. At my job, managers often tell me “You are doing…
Project Reclass: ToyNet
One thing that has always unsettled me about being a technologist is the sensation that I’m taking jobs away from others. It began during my first internship in 2013 at Amazon headquarters. I noticed that homelessness is a major problem in Seattle, and the general consensus amongst the locals was that the tech companies were…
Datadog: Chaos Engineering
I had the pleasure of open sourcing https://github.com/DataDog/chaos-controller, Datadog’s in-house chaos tooling for Kubernetes native disruptions. In this talk, my team lead Joris Bonnefoy and I share how network disruptions and CPU disruptions work underneath the hood all the way down to the networking interfaces of the Kubernnetes nodes and pods. See Network Prio Documentation…
Datadog: Engineering Spotlight
For five long years from 2015 to 2020, I woke up every morning wondering if I could ever proudly identify as a software engineer. Coding was difficult for me, and despite selfless mentor after mentor investing time into me, I would look at successful women on stage at events and think, “That is not me;…
Tay Nishimura 