As an engineer, I love tackling difficult problems, especially while collaborating with other passionate people. I embody my personal values of empathy, hardwork, and creativity to elevate any team I’m a part of. Moving into management and engineering leadership has made me a better engineer, as I learned how to balance competing priorities, lead others, develop careers, ask difficult questions, and make difficult decisions. I find engineering leadership incredbily fulfilling because, while they are farther and fewer inbetween, the wins are greater and more satisfying on a different scale. That said, I still enjoy being an IC and having “hands-on-keyboard”, helping out wherever I can.
George Luong
Engineering Manager
Profile
Experiences
Slack
2021.08 - Present
Engineering Manager, Monitoring Infrastructure
Remote
- Deprecated Graphite
- Moved services from EC2 to Slack’s Kubernetes platform to reduce maintenance overhead
- Conference talks and blog posts
- Mentored engineers considering the switch from IC to management
- Hired 2 engineers (so far!)
Slack
2021.04 - 2021.08
Technical Lead Manager, Monitoring Infrastructure
Remote
- Started to transition to management by taking over managerial tasks (career development, work prioritization)
- Project management for the Monitoring team
- Helped the team deliver key projects like GovCloud, ELK7 upgrade
- Shaved services out of the team’s purview by finding better service owners or through deprecation
- Promoted 2 Senior (L7) engineers to Staff (L8) level
- Guided the team through a time of high turnover and turmoil
Slack
2019.02 - 2021.08
Staff Engineer, Visibility Infrastructure
San Francisco, California
- Mentored new team members and other engineers across engineering
- Developed and taught Intro to Visibility courses for new hires
- Scaled Slack’s observability stack from millions to billions of time series
Slack
2017.02 - 2019.02
Senior Engineer, Visibility Operations
San Francisco, California
- Deployed Slack’s first (and for many years, main) Kafka cluster for log queueing
- Built out Prometheus stacks for all of Slack’s metrics
- Developed and maintained events pipeline for key business metrics (active users, billing info, server logs, client logs)
- Helped build out Slack’s IDR regions
- Mentored interns and new grads
Slack
2015.07 - 2017.02
Operations Engineer
San Francisco, California
- SRE for all Slack services (messaging, job queue, databases, observability, webapp)
- Wrote a metadata service for Slack’s databases
- Built out Graphite stack to replace a vendor for metrics
- Incident response
- Participated in Slack’s only on-call rotation for the entire service
Box
2014.08 - 2015.07
Storage Operations Engineer
Los Altos, California
- Transferred out of the NOC and into the Storage Operations team
- SRE embedded with Storage Dev team
- Loadtesting for Box’s new Storage Service
- Built tooling to report on Orphaned/Lost files
- Managed Box’s “Filer” system
- For almost all this duration, served as Box’s only Storage Ops on-call engineer
- Mentored new engineers who entered the NOC career track
Box
2014.06 - 2014.08
NOC Engineer
Los Altos, California
- The role was redefined because it included engineering work
- Same responsibilites as the Operations Technician, but expanded role due to growing skillset
- Wrote automation for self-recovery of system failures
- SRE-trainee rotating through many areas of the Technical Operations org
- Internal internship with Box’s Storage team
Box
2013.02 - 2014.06
Operations Technician
Los Altos, California
- Incident response, plus responsible for company-wide and external (status site) communication
- First responder for alerts and pages
- Junior system admin
Education
UC San Diego
2006 - 2010
Human Biology
Bachelor
Publications
Languages
- Bash/Shell
- Python
- Ruby