Lesley Cordero (she/her)

About Me

Hi there! I am a Software Engineer by training and a community builder and writer by passion. I'm also a frequent speaker within the DevOps space. I've worked at and with organizations of varying sizes, which has exposed me to a wide set of technical and architectural challenges. My specialization, however, is in distributed systems, particularly service-oriented architectures with varying communication techniques.

I began my career as a Data Engineer focused on building ETL/ELT pipelines that integrate with clients in the edtech space. This led to a strong foundation for tackling large data problems that I carried through the rest of my career.

Working with developers at other companies led me to my role on the Google for Education team, where I led technical integrations with third-party companies. I was at Google during the transition to remote learning in 2020 and dealt with technical challenges I never thought I'd see in my career. These challenges instilled a deep appreciation for reliability management and has been my primary problem space since.

When I transitioned to Teachers Pay Teachers as a tech lead, I focused on challenges at the organizational level, taking both a bottom up and top down approach to driving sociotechnical change. I began and executed on a focused reliability efforts that included improving our observability story, adopting SLOs, and using chaos engineering in production environments.

Currently, I am at The New York Times as a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead. So far I have focused on setting technical vision and strategy, leading a large monolith decomposition project, driving standardization, and mentoring & coaching other engineers.

Talks & Content

I have given over a dozen talks, mostly in the Site Reliability Engineering space. Most recently, I've delivered talks about effective observability practices, psychologically safe reliability management, technical vision and strategy, and chaos engineering.

Some conferences I've spoken at include LeadDev New York, All Day DevOps, Lesbians Who Tech, The DEVOPS Conference, and numerous DevOpsDays. My upcoming speaking engagements include DataDog Dash 2022, All Day DevOps 2022, and NDC London 2023.

I'm also a frequent content contributor. Most recently, my contributions have been via LeadDev, but I've previously contributed to Twilio and Google Cloud Engineering blogs.

Get in touch!

You can reach me through a few avenues: Twitter, Linkedin, or email.