Greg Burrell Email & Phone Number

Retired! I had a long and rewarding career. I enjoyed working with some amazing people. I'm proud of the work I did at Netflix. I look back and think, "Wow, I was one of the handful of people who built streaming from the ground up!" I worked a lot of hours and days over the years. Now I'm going to travel and enjoy life while I'm still young(ish). I begin a new era of my life.

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

I was a member of the CORE team responsible for the availability of Netflix’s global streaming service. CORE ensures Netflix consistently achieves 99.99% availability in the face of massive growth in scale and complexity.• As an Incident Commander I carried the pager day and night to triage, troubleshoot, and coordinate fast and smooth incident response.• I conducted post-incident investigations to blamelessly uncover the factors that contributed and turn those into action items to prevent recurrences.• Risk identification. Identifying the risks to our availability and addressing those risks before they become incidents. • I initiated an incident taxonomy project in which I analyzed past incidents to identify their contributing factors. From this I derived a fine-grained incident tagging system that enabled us to identify hotspots. • In the Production Always Ready project I provided a comprehensive set of best practices for engineering teams to follow as they build, deploy, monitor, and operate their microservices. This was the first step towards automation that would enable engineering teams to self-assess and identify readiness gaps.• I participated in operational preparedness and day-of-show operations room for Netflix’s first-ever Live broadcast.• I conducted focus groups to measure the effectiveness of CORE’s engagements with developers and managers. This resulted in cutting costly publications and events to better focus our efforts on the most impactful areas of evangelism.

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

I am a founder and leader of the Indigenous@ Netflix employee resource group (ERG). Our mission is to build an inclusive and supportive community for our Indigenous employees through recruitment, retention, professional development, networking, and mentorship.• As a leader I programmed and conducted monthly meetings, wrote the monthly newsletter, mentored members of our leadership team, and coordinated company-wide events featuring guest speakers.• I worked with the content team to create the Indigenous Peoples Stories collection on the Netflix service.• I spoke to various business units wanting to learn about the Indigenous experience. I believe that reaching a diverse employee and consumer audience first requires knowledge and understanding. • I partnered with the Netflix recruitment team to host a networking event in Seattle. The high turnout was very engaged and we received appreciation that Netflix would make such an effort.

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

As a Technical Product Manager in the Developer Productivity org I leverage my years of working with Tier1 streaming services and my experience on tool-building teams.• I interviewed more than 70 developers from dozens of engineering teams in order to gain understanding of developers’ needs, frustrations, and suggestions.• I built a tagged Airtable database of my interview learnings to identify and address top developer pain points. • I used direct quotes from these interviews to build connection and empathy with our tool and platform building teams.• From this interview data I formulated Problem Hypotheses which formed the basis for our Developer Productivity strategy and product roadmaps.• I created a set of Personas based on the learnings from my developer interviews. The Developer Productivity org uses these Personas to represent and understand its customers.

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

My SRE experience and focus on developer productivity enabled me to create a unique role in which I worked with tool-building teams to understand the needs of their users, support and grow customer bases, and prioritize new features. • I evangelized Telltale (next-generation intelligent monitoring and alerting) throughout Netflix, collected requirements, and prioritized feature development. Telltale reduced Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), and operating costs for hundreds of service owners. • I championed Edgar (a tool that traces requests, pinpoints errors, layers on graphs and metrics, and brings in relevant logs) to additional engineering teams throughout Netflix, explored their use cases to collect requirements, and prioritized the work needed for these additional customer segments. More about Edgar in the NetflixTech Blog. • I lead the Templated Data Capture (TDC) project which built an end-to-end solution for rapid application development. TDC allowed the Technical Solutions team to quickly spin up new applications and provided authorization, data validation, and a safe route for ingesting external data into the Netflix ecosystem.

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

As a Consulting SRE I leveraged my years of experience operating our large-scale and highly-available global streaming service. In this role I ensured our Streaming engineering teams had the tools, training, and practices to confidently operate the services they owned. • I increased engineering velocity by automating workflows that encapsulated best practices. Through this automation I eliminated toil, reduced risk, and avoided engineer burnout.• As an advocate for safe CI/CD I defined requirements, introduced use cases, and provided rapid feedback on new features to the Spinnaker (Netflix’s open-source release automation) team.• I worked with data scientists to automate the task of finding bad servers. The result was Kepler, an automated system for finding and removing outlier servers. We received US patent #15042116 for this.• I leveraged the best-practices I developed and worked with a data scientist to produce Automated Canary Analysis. This system has stopped thousands of bad changes from going into production and has given development teams the confidence to quickly iterate and release their own code changes. Netflix continues to use this system and it was open sourced as Kayenta.

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

For the nascent Streaming service I took on the roles of Build & Release engineer, System Administrator, and Operations Engineer. In these roles I built out the Netflix streaming infrastructure, created best practices, and delivered automation in support of these roles.• My deep knowledge of our software, architecture, and networks led me to be the sole on-call person for the first four years of our new streaming service. I was on-call 24x7 to troubleshoot and fix the streaming service so our millions of subscribers could continue watching.• I set up and tuned monitoring, alerting, and dashboards so we always knew the health of our systems and could quickly diagnose issues.• I scripted build and release automation so our developers could quickly build and test their code changes in a safe and repeatable way.• I lead server capacity planning for the streaming service: I conducted performance tests to measure and worked with our system administrators to build out server capacity ahead of growing consumer demand.• I oversaw server testing, trained a new DevOps team, and worked on the transition from data centers to the cloud (AWS).• I wrote a very popular article for the Netflix Tech Blog in which I describe our journey from silos and a waterfall system to Full Cycle Developers in which engineering teams own every aspect of the software lifecycle. This article was translated and reprinted in several countries, it has also been taught in classes. I drew upon this experience to delivery a well-received QCon talk on Full Cycle Developers.

Los Gatos, Ca, Us

I was hired by Netflix to be part of a small team experimenting with sending movies over the Internet. This ten-person team built client hardware & software as well as the entire backend server ecosystem and our own content delivery network (CDN). Our creation is now the future of movie watching.• In addition to server and end-to-end testing I also set up our first continuous integration system, built load testing tools, created our first device lab, built out the streaming ecosystem within our data center, and advised the networking team on requirements for our nation-wide CDN. I also created tools to manage movie files within our CDN.• I partnered with content teams to test new encodes so that we might find the optimal balance between file size, streaming speed, and video quality.• I trained our system and network administrators about the new streaming service so that they could partner with me to provision, build out, and help operate our new streaming service.• Just before we launched the streaming service I was given a special commendation by the first Director of Streaming for getting the team to the launch point.

New York, Ny, Us

Worked on Installer technology for America Online products.