🥪 PBJ Engineering
About Us
🥜 palash
I'm a builder who likes to focus on meaningful products and empowering great teams around them. The technology is important, and really fun, but it is just a tool to an end.
I worked at Facebook for 5 years as one of the first engineers on the Advertiser Growth team, helping create and sustain a culture of rapid iteration, tight integration between design/pm/eng, with an emphasis on experimentation and data driven decision making.
I then joined the Summit Learning Platform team (with Bhal!) and spent time working on school data syncing, teacher onboarding and training, and internal developer infrastructure. Most recently, at CZI, I was a founding engineer on Along, doing a little bit (or a lot) of everything in the stack to get us from 0 to launch and beyond.
🧈 bhal
I'm a Software Engineer turned Consultant/Advisor. I look for opportunities to work with great people at organizations I respect and admire.
I worked at Facebook (now Meta) for almost ten years. I was a founding engineer on the Site Integrity team. I designed and built services to protect people on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. I helped grow that team to more than fifty engineers, designers and PMs.
Later, I was an early engineer on the small team that designed and built the Summit Learning Platform (with Palash!). In addition to building significant chunks of the product, I also helped it scale two orders of magnitude. Prior to consulting, I also did short stints at CZI (making a de novo genome assembler more memory-efficient and user friendly) and Airtable (improving performance across the stack).
Strengths
📐 System Design and Review
Drop us in for immediate feedback on individual projects, or let us define (and refine) a long term infrastructure strategy for your entire company. We will work with your team to identify the strengths, gaps, and risks in your plans, and guide them towards building systems that are simpler, more reliable, and easier to maintain. Expect lots of "why?" questions to stay aligned with real use cases and your long term product vision.
🏎️ Performance and Efficiency
We have a knack for identifying and fixing performance bottlenecks in software. Experience across the full stack, from browser to network to app server to database means we can read in the whole picture and find wins inside complex interactions. We love making things leaner and meaner, so expect us to share the skills and passion for performance work with other engineers along the way.
🧰 Tools and Dev Ops
Good tools, well configured, are powerful levers. We've built some of those tools too. We could establish CI/CD and build pipelines, migrate to Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform or Pulumi, simplify developer environment management and setup, integrate monitoring and alerting tools, or find anything else thats slowing your team down and reduce the friction.
🍎 Zero to One. One to Ten
No matter what stage your engineering team is at, embed us as force multipliers and we can help it take the next step. Fair game could be offering pragmatic feedback on tech specs, shaping culture around PR review, modeling technical leadership, mentoring conversations with individuals, or anything else in between.
📋 Hiring and Technical Interviews
Between the two of us, we have hundreds of hours of experience in designing, conducting, and training the technical interview process. We'll work with you to identify hiring priorities, create job relevant interview questions (no algorithm quizzes!!), and develop training guides to improve calibration and consistency.
🔒 Personal Online Privacy
We are deeply passionate about privacy on the Internet. As companies push the boundaries on tracking and data collection, there's a surprising amount we can do to protect our privacy online (including but not limited to firewalls with network wide VPNs, DNS, Browsers, Operating Systems, Phones, etc.). We can sit with you and help you craft a plan. If you prefer, we can implement significant chunks of this plan for you.
Contact
We love to talk shop. Give us a "ring" to discuss any software, product, or process problems you have, even if they’re outside the above.
consult <at> pbjengineering · com
References
Happy to share as part of initial conversation.