Joined DataStax Engineering Team

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In April I joined DataStax as a director of engineering on the DataStax Enterprise engineering team. I meant to post something here during my first week, but have been kind of busy since I started (understatement!). We sell an enterprise-class version of the open-source Cassandra database, along with service, support, and training. We also support the Cassandra community and the open-source project itself (the Apache Cassandra committee chair and many committers are all DataStax employees).

My first five week have been both busy and exciting. Here are some observations and highlights so far:

  • It’s great to work for a smaller company once again – everyone is very motivated and focused on the mission, and it’s a very small circle of decision-makers.
  • I’ve worked for companies with remote workers before (especially Citrix), but here we take it to a whole new level. We just call it a “distributed” workforce. In particular the engineering team is spread literally around the world. Many of our job postings list the location as “Anywhere, World” which is quite appropriate.
  • We really like using SaaS based products, and have hardly any “infrastructure” hardware/servers of our own (just a few systems for Engineering & QA). Everything else is “in the cloud”.
  • I’ve had a big learning curve on distributed NoSQL databases in general, Cassandra, and all of the DataStax products.

DataStax is really growing quickly and we’re looking for strong people in a variety of areas. Check out the DataStax Careers page for current openings and let me know if I can help make a referral for you.

In particular these are some key open positions in my group:

  • Driver & Tools Engineer
  • Java Engineer
  • Software Engineer in Test

This Jobvite link will take you to the details page for those 3 positions.