Abnormal Engineering Stories, Episode #4: Scaling Front’s Cloud Infrastructure to Multiple Data Centers in Under 3 Months

Working at hyper-growth startups usually means that unreasonable expectations will be thrust on individuals and teams. Demanding timelines, goals, and expectations can lead to high pressure, stress, accountability, and ultimately, extraordinary growth and achievements.

Sean Xie, Director of Engineering at Front, is no stranger to high growth and high stakes environments. As a new engineering hire, Sean’s first project was to scale Front’s cloud infrastructure to run in multiple data centers in under 3 months. This was a project with great execution risk and significant long-term impact. Building the right foundational infrastructure to enable Front’s engineering team to easily manage multiple data centers could pay great dividends long term for the team. The opposite was also true; building the wrong system would also create long-term operational tasks that will be very painful and costly to fix later on.

Learn from Sean’s experience, and hear about what strategies he used to successfully execute a complex project under extreme time pressure.

We hope you enjoy it! Please do subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.