
CEO at Opscode
Greater Seattle Area

CEO at Opscode
Greater Seattle Area
Jesse Robbins is passionate about Scalable Infrastructure, Emergency Management, and Community Empowerment.
He currently serves as Co-Chair of the Velocity Performance & Operations conference, technical Advisor to Swivel, and is part of the O'Reilly Radar. He has unique experience in both Technology and Emergency Management and is excited by projects where they can be combined.
Previously he worked for Amazon.com where he was responsible for Website Availability. He is a volunteer Firefighter & Emergency Medical Technician, and served as a Task Force Leader after Hurricane Katrina.
Jesse lives in Seattle, WA.
Infrastructure, IT Operations, Distributed Systems, SOA, Web services, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Firefighting, Emergency Medicine, Hazardous Materials, Technical Rescue
(Internet industry)
July 2008 — Present (4 months)
slightly stealthy
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Publishing industry)
September 2007 — Present (1 year 2 months)
Velocity is the O'Reilly conference for people building at Internet scale.
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Research industry)
June 2007 — Present (1 year 5 months)
Swivel's mission is to make data useful. I'm helping Swivel develop the technology required to fulfill that mission.
(Internet industry)
June 2007 — Present (1 year 5 months)
I speak and write about technology, operations, emergency management, and making the world a better place. I provide insight, research, and connections for O'Reilly Radar.
I have been honored to speak about technology changes and how they affect policy at the following:
* OECD Economic Forum in Istanbul 2007
* Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy - "Computing in the Cloud" workshop
* Stanford Center for International Security - Department of Homeland Security "NetTech" summit
* National Association of Emergency Managers (NEMA) Annual Meeting (2008)
I have also spoken about Web Operations & Emergency Management at numerous conferences:
* Web2.0 Expo 2007
* ETech 2008
* Where2.0 2008
(Non-Profit Organization Management industry)
October 2006 — July 2008 (1 year 10 months)
BarCampBank is a series of unconference events dedicated to "fostering innovation and the creation of new business models in banking and finance".
I organized the first BarCampBank in the US along with Ben Black. It was an incredible experience, and has since sparked a movement.
(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; AMZN; Information Technology and Services industry)
January 2006 — November 2006 (11 months)
Led and participated in numerous projects and programs to improve availability for all websites bearing the Amazon brand. Highlights included the following:
GameDay Program - Created an iterative program to improve company-wide availability through fault-injection into Amazon’s most critical systems.
ScaleDay Program – Created a successful program to improve Amazon’s fourth-quarter availability through periodic stress testing on front-end websites.
(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; AMZN; Information Technology and Services industry)
April 2004 — January 2006 (1 year 10 months)
Managed team of systems engineers and network engineers as part of the 24x7 operations center operating the Amazon.com platform. Responsibilities include day-to-day supervision, project management, employee development, reviews, compensation, and hiring.
Wrote and contributed to numerous policy and best-practices documents on a variety of subjects including systems architecture, distributed systems, fault-tolerant design, security, legal compliance, and disaster recovery.
Call Leader Program – Created and participated a rotation of senior leaders engaged as the highest level of escalation to manage high-severity issues and events.
Incident Management Initiative, Principal Contributor – Standardized high-severity event management across the company, 4000+ technical employees to effectively engage and resolve problems.
(Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Non-Profit Organization Management industry)
September 2005 — December 2005 (4 months)
Organized and led a 26 person task force as to assist underserved communities in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Sixty- five shelters were set up, some taken down and moved, resulting in 80 deployed shelters.
(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; AMZN; Information Technology and Services industry)
August 2001 — April 2004 (2 years 9 months)
Responsible for several key areas of the Amazon website, including over 10 teams and 25 distinct software applications. Duties included day-to-day operation of over 400 servers, performance tuning, software benchmarking and profiling, design and architecture review, and server lifecycle management.
Participated in the design and led the implementation of Amazon’s Global Enterprise Backup System. Mentored and supervised two systems engineers assigned to the project. Initial daily backup size was over 12 terabytes with total capacity for 16. Overall archive size was over a petabyte with multiple datacenters and offsite vault locations throughout the US.
(Government Agency; 51-200 employees; Public Safety industry)
December 1999 — June 2001 (1 year 7 months)
Completed California Firefighter-I certification while serving the City of Palo Alto working one 24 hour shift per week. Duties included responding to fire and medical calls, routine station and equipment maintenance, public education and training, company drills, inspections, housekeeping duties and other tasks.
International Association of Emergency Managers, IAEM, Washington State Firefighter Association
FOO Camp, June 2007: Attendee
OECD World Forum, June 2007: Speaker and Panelist on "New Technology for the Next Generation"
Web2.0 Expo, April 2007: Speaker on "Failures, Disasters, & Resilient Design"