I come to technology from an unusual background as I studied Chemical Engineering in college at the University of Southern California (USC). After graduating, I initially worked in a technical sales role at Cisco. Production engineering was a perfect fit for my atypical assortment of skills and experience. To start off, reliability is extremely important for chemical engineers, as failures in plants often result in fires or other serious issues. Even though I wasn’t working on computer systems then, I absolutely learned the mindset of design with scalability and reliability in mind.

Then at Cisco, I learned lots about networking, of course, and worked with several customers with very large and mission-critical networks. I very much enjoyed networking, but wanted to move my career path to include coding more as well, so I took both programming and operating systems classes at De Anza (a community college in the Bay Area). With all those previous experiences, when I learned about production engineering, I couldn't have imagined a better role for me.

At the start of 2017, I opted for a new type of challenge, and transferred from Menlo Park to the London office. I now work with the Production Engineering Developer Infrastructure team on end-to-end testing (Managing resources for large-scale testing is one of my main project areas). The move to London has been full of growth both personally and professionally, experiencing a new country and many new cultures in this very diverse office.

When a production engineering recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn about interviewing for production engineering at Facebook, the thought that went through my mind was “I'd interview to do anything at Facebook just to learn what the process is like, but there is no way I'll ever get a job there.” Although the interview process was challenging, the recruiter was very helpful at each stage, giving me a good sense of the technical topics to be covered and some ideas to prepare. I took their suggestions very seriously and put in quite a bit of review and practice time. While I certainly didn't pull off any of the interviews perfectly by any means, I felt I was given the best opportunity possible to fully demonstrate my skills and really enjoyed the process at each stage.

I absolutely love the variety of production engineering. I have the opportunity to work with technologies at every layer of Facebook, from physical servers in our data center to application side testing and logging, all while on the same team. Reliability is a full-stack problem, so production engineers look at both our team's service and all related dependencies. I also very much enjoy connecting the dots between the engineers working on these various layers to make the whole stronger and more resilient. Production engineers get to touch every corner of Facebook infra.

Don’t hesitate to ask lots of questions and get your hands dirty. The best way to become a good production engineer is by jumping in and doing things, even if you don’t consider yourself an expert on that technology. Particularly when starting out, trying out any and all tasks is guaranteed to help you in the future – either the specific thing you worked on or the problem-solving patterns you used will certainly crop up again.

Engineers always learn from each other's technical background on the job, but working with people from many places also means we have very different cultural backgrounds. Every engineer on my team is from a different country, so we all have different styles of communicating and working. Diverse teams like these can learn a ton from each other on softer skills like communication and efficiency as well as the usual tech topics.

I'm originally from Los Angeles, so the Bay Area is quite similar to where I grew up. While I love California, I had always thought it would be fun to experience living in a new place, ideally in another country, and was on the lookout for an opportunity to make this happen. I first visited the London office in May 2016 and absolutely loved the feel of the office and the city around it. When the time was right for a team change, I told my manager I was interested in relocating to London if possible. After a few meetings with London PE managers and HR, everything was in motion! Facebook took care of most of the the move logistics and sponsored my UK visa, which greatly reduced the stress of an international move. When I arrived, my new manager was also extremely supportive in helping me get set up with the local office and making sure I had time to do moving related tasks. I've been here for almost nine months and love it as much as I predicted I would.

Facebook London is growing quickly, but is still a relatively small office, which makes it easier to establish personal relationships across many different teams and provides a family feel. The office is very diverse, with people coming from all over the world, so I have learned very much about different cultures. Lastly, the location is also fantastic, both in terms of being right in the center of such a vibrant city and a 1-2 hour flight from anywhere in Europe.

I love traveling all over the world, particularly to places where I can venture into the outdoors. My absolute favorite trips involve climbing tall mountains. Since moving to London, I've started exploring all the corners of Europe in earnest. Wherever I go, I very much enjoy capturing the personality of a place through photography.