Introduction

At both Stripe and Uber, I parachuted into leading infrastructure engineering organizations supporting a rapidly growing business, technology platform, and engineering team. Those teams ended up solving so many problems from zero that were already thoroughly solved at other similar organizations. Throughout the software industry we spend a great deal of time resolving well understood problems, and it’s rarely because folks want to. Instead, those solutions are often locked inside the companies that have already solved them.

My aim for Infrastructure Engineering is to provide the approach, investments, processes, and tools to run an effective infrastructure engineering organization. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to see around the corners as your organization operates and grows.

This book is intended for anyone working within and adjacent with an infrastructure engineering organization, whether you’re the organization’s engineering leader, a technical program manager partnering into it, or an engineer advocating for a change in how you operate. This is not a book about using specific tools well, but instead a book that outlines the fundamental challenges that you’ll encounter running such an organization and an approach to resolving them.

Of course, as I describe the approaches that I’ve found effective, they’re going to be influenced by the experiences that have shaped my own career. This playbook is rooted in solving the needs of fast growing infrastructure companies that expanded rapidly from serving the US domestic market to the much wider international one, in tandem to moving from internally supporting dozens of engineers to supporting thousands. My experiences will never perfectly align with your current circumstances. Take the pieces that resonate with you, learn about your own beliefs as you consider the pieces that you disagree with, and always remember the fundamental rule of good leadership: the details matter.

With that, into the fray!