Bruce H Chu

February 2020 » May 2022 July 2019 » February 2020 September 2016 » July 2019 Led multiple infrastructure orgs through a period of high growth and a successful IPO. Played a key leadership role in multiple infrastructure tech transformations that enabled the overall engineering organization to scale up from 500 to 2000+ engineers.

• Tech strategy: Airbnb's service architecture evolved from a monolithic Rails app to a microservices architecture on multi-cluster k8s and this required a reimagining of the foundational tech stack. Worked with tech leaders within my teams and across the engineering org to build out the multi-year strategy; delivered scalable, resilient platforms and frameworks for services infrastructure, compute and developer productivity.
• Organizational leadership: Grew the Developer Productivity org from 15 to 45 engineers (7 teams) and led org of 12 teams / 100 engineers as Head of Production Platform. Consistently positive (high or improving) team engagement scores.
• Technical Quality: Improved core infrastructure reliability from 99.9% to 99.94% by upleveling reliability best practices and leading the team through scalability and availability code yellows.
• Compute modernization && efficiency: % of overall compute on k8s for Airbnb production systems went from 0 to 60% and through efficiency efforts cut cloud costs by ~25% (10s of millions of dollars).
• Improved Developer Experience NPS from -53 to +10 (Sept 2016 - July 2019) through significant improvements in the tools, frameworks and platforms that Airbnb engineers used to build, test and launch code with quality and at scale; new platforms for code coverage, source control, build, CI, CD, service reliability.
• Performance management: made several contributions to improve performance management across the engineering organization -- promotion committee, calibration and performance management guidance, revisions of the engineering ladder, and career guidance for Staff+ level engineers.
• Vendor management: Airbnb technical sponsor for AWS and CDN; AWS customer advisory board.

October 2014 » May 2016 Manage and lead Software Engineering, DevOps and QA functions through multiple successful product launches, key customer onboardings for enterprise SaaS Applicant Tracking System, Lever ATS. The company grew from 15 to 80+ and went from Series A to B funding.

• Grew engineering team from 4 to 16, building a strong engineering organization committed to continuous improvement, trust and collaboration. Adapted engineering processes to combine successfully with Lever's "design thinking" approach to product development (incremental waterfall).
• Drive maturation of engineering org by introducing needed best practices to increase predictability and improve execution; code reviews, project planning, architecture reviews, QA checklists, etc.
• As the first manager at the company, established continuous performance review structure with quarterly objective setting, weekly check-ins and monthly assessments.
• Just do it: contributed across the stack from individual contributor (primarily devops and infrastructure focused, wrote the search feature) to direct people manager to leading the engineering function

September 2011 » March 2013 Lead software engineering and product teams (35+ people) for 50Cubes, an indie social / mobile game developer behind the #1 Fashion Facebook game of 2011, MallWorld. Brought in to bring leadership and structure to an engineering team that had grown rapidly; within a few quarters, took over additional functions: product, content and customer support.

• Revamped development processes: transformed team from ad-hoc product and engineering to more predictable Agile and Kan-ban processes, which dramatically improved execution velocity and accuracy, aka "build the right things, fast and well".
• Launched two new mobile titles for iOS and web, Fashion Tale and Style Touch and re-launched Fashion Designer social game on Zynga.com.
• Scaled up team leadership by training up 4 managers to take over day to day project and people management and decision making
• As a member of the executive committee, worked with CEO, CTO and CRO to set product, revenue and strategic roadmap.

January 2007 » June 2009 As one of the first five engineers, helped drive the product and platform for the youth-oriented social network, Bebo.com, to a highly successful acquisition by AOL in May, 2008. Registered users grew from 20MM to 40MM during this period and page views increased 10x to ~10B monthly. Headed product and engineering for Bebo OpenMedia and Safety / Privacy, which were significant factors in the acquisition.

• Lead Bebo OpenMedia (Music, Platform, Video, Groups and Originals) product and engineering, which consisted of Bebo Original Content (e.g. KateModern, Sofia's Diary), third party produced and user generated content, infrastructure for streaming content (powered by MotionBox, VideoEgg and Ooyala).
• Worked directly with Bebo's Chief Safety Officer to lead Safety / Privacy Engineering prioritization and execution. Because of Bebo's young user base, Safety and Privacy were significant priorities for user experience.
• Architect and implement numerous Web 2.0 features for Bebo core product using JSP, Java and Python that drove user growth and engagement. Highlights include Visitor Map, Profile Views server, un-authorized content scanning (safety and copyright infringement).

Jan 2002 » September 2006 September 2000 » January 2002 Managed 20+ person Delivery and Anti-spam Team, engineering, research and operations for Yahoo Mail backend services (MTA, POP, SMTP, IMAP). This was a period tremendous growth for Yahoo Mail in which it became the #1 world-wide email service provider. Had a significant role in scaling up the leadership, personnel, practices and product for the entire Yahoo Mail team.

• Grew team from 1 to 20+ engineers in Sunnyvale and Bangalore.
• Scaled Yahoo Mail Delivery horizontally and vertically to provide high throughput and availability world-wide: Emails/day: 100M -> 10B; Servers: ~100 -> ~1000 across; Colos: 1 -> 10.
• Improved anti-spam effectiveness (accuracy, false positives, and false negatives) as spam rates grew from ~30% to ~80% of emails. Ensured that solutions were robust, reliable, durable, and multi-approach.
• Roadmapped anti-spam initiatives with product, engineering and leadership and then led engineering teams that built and launched these projects. Key projects included AddressGuard, SpamGuard+, DomainKeys, IP/URL reputation, Traffic shaping. Yahoo filed for multiple anti-spam patents under my leadership.
• Scaled up software engineering and 24x7 operations practices to grow with the team; introduced release management, automated testing, performance testing, code reviews, oncall rotation, escalation policy, capacity planning, incident reports that became standards for the entire Mail team.
• As lead engineer for Yahoo Mail Delivery, the inbound and outbound servers delivering email to millions of users, rewrote code to increase reliability, scalability and performance. Dynamically adjusted capacity through failure caching dependent resources (DB, connections) and email deliverability.
• Promoted to engineering manager in January 2002.
• Fostered innovation and excellence. Three Yahoo Spirit award winners related to anti-spam were awarded during my tenure. Team also developed core infrastructure: build (Buildicus), server logging (yLog4cpp), stat (yStat), configuration management (yConf), some of which were adopted company-wide.
Refactored core components of MTA server software, establishing key system real-time metrics (uptime and resource consumption), and adding level-based runtime logging.
Design and launched new features such as Business Mail and Secure Email.
Handled 24x7 operations in cooperation with the Yahoo NOC. Performed builds, releases and new machine deployments across multiple co-location sites.
Introduced software best practices such as release management and source control to ensure a reliable production environment.