Being a Distinguished Engineer means you need to walk this tightrope between what everyone knows is possible and what you know could be done. When you get more senior, it’s about judgment that produces business results.

If I had a friend who was thinking about joining, I would tell them: “This is a technology playground with awesome people.”

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

I initially came to Google as a Software Engineer on a Development team. After a few years, I did a rotation in the SRE organization, and I was so impressed by the culture and approach to engineering challenges that I made the transfer permanent.

One of the benefits of SRE teams approaching operating systems as a software engineering problem, is that SRE teams are relatively small compared to the partner development teams. This is great for career growth, as SREs end up working with more senior partners in the development organization. Learning incident response from some of the best folks in the industry, and getting to apply those skills in high-impact situations to keep our users safe has also been a rewarding experience.

I am currently the Tech Lead for Cloud Compute SRE. My time is split between nurturing a strong and diverse engineering culture, being part of the team that responds to serious outages of Google services, and building reliable, elastic, efficient, global-scale Compute infrastructure.

My main engineering focus is improving Cloud Compute scalability and efficiency: to enable our users to grow their business and never worry about the Compute infrastructure behind it. Getting that done using resources efficiently is a really challenging combination of system engineering problems in various parts of the technology stack, and means working across multiple organizations and job roles.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.