Jay Parikh on Scaling Facebook's Infrastructure

09/28/20 • 40 min

In this episode, we speak with Jay Parikh, Facebook’s outgoing VP of engineering. Jay is the architect behind Facebook’s data center infrastructure and engineering teams, who helped design and execute the physical layer that underpins the platform.

"We came together and had this big meeting and decided 'Okay. Well, we have to go and build our own infrastructure.' We had really no choice given the fact that we were scaling so rapidly. And we started to just struggle with the off-the-shelf kind of solutions out there, both open source software that we had. We massaged and bent those pieces of software as far as they could probably go," says Jay.

Jay realized that he had to fundamentally change the way Facebook built resiliency into its systems. Deploying a network for 300 million people is much different than deploying one for 3 billion people.

Quentin Clark and Steve Herrod dug in deeper with Jay about what happened in the years afterward.

Quentin Clark and Steve Herrod dug in deeper with Jay about what happened in the years afterward.

Previous Episode

Slack CPO Tamar Yehoshua on Humanizing Software

In this episode, we're speaking with Tamar Yehoshua, the Chief Product Officer at Slack.

We’re talking about designing products for the future of work, today.

The pandemic injected a lot of urgency at Slack, which saw user growth explode after millions of people suddenly started working from home. We’re still sorting through how this mass-remote work culture will impact workplace collaboration -- and Tamar’s team is thinking deeply about how to better serve this new world in a human way.

"A lot of what I think about when developing software is how do you understand the emotional state of your user and being able to speak to that? How do you make sure your user, whoever's using your product feels good, doesn't make them feel stupid. We like to say that at Slack don't make your users feel stupid," says Tamar.

Tamar has been the CPO of Slack since early 2019. Before that, she was a VP at Google with product and engineering roles across search and privacy. She was also a VP at Amazon’s search engine ad company, A9.

Steve Herrod and Quentin Clark speak with Tamar about how she’s creating products, managing teams, and learning new things about Slack in this drastically different work environment.

Next Episode

David Hahn on Building Product LinkedIn, InstaCart, and GoFundMe

In this episode, we talk with David Hahn, the former CPO of Instacart.

Throughout his career, David has learned deep and meaningful lessons about what individual and enterprise customers need -- and how to translate those needs into fun, usable products.

His resume includes a wide range of successful tech startups. So we asked him what ties those experiences at LinkedIn, GoFundMe and Instacart together.

“I think there's some times where people look at kind of growth work and say, ‘Oh, gosh, those guys are just focused on button color, et cetera.’ And the reality is that the consumers really react to relatively small differences and things like word choice and things like button placement. They very much react to how much you really simplified a particular experience.”

Quentin and Steve about designing for growth, having empathy for users, and the nuances of small adjustments.

This podcast is produced by Post Script Audio in collaboration with General Catalyst.