About me

I’m a crisis engineer at Layer Aleph. We repair and restore complex systems. My specialties are designing resilient software, increasing scalability, distributed data storage, and finding the simplest path through a mess. Based in NYC.

Recent Writing

BIO

Carla likes debugging complex systems, especially those made of both software and humans.

Her work spans Google and multiple federal agencies with the United States Digital Services. Most recently, Carla led a team at Fastly to fix systemic resilience problems. Her team’s work addressed a widespread outage, retained customers, and dramatically improved recovery time of core caching systems.

During her 12-year tenure at Google, she was responsible for keeping hundreds of petabytes of data safe and accessible. She also helped establish site reliability engineering (SRE) principles that are still used by Google and most modern tech companies. Along the way, she quietly swapped out major system components and managed several incidents that didn’t end up on the front page of the newspaper.

During the 2014 to 2015 open enrollment season, Carla led the operations for Healthcare.gov. There, she diagnosed failures at all layers of the system, from the Linux kernel to the White House Office of General Counsel. She also worked with the Defense Digital Service to introduce DevOps on the next-generation GPS ground control system (OCX).