Staff Software Engineer — Infrastructure
Site Reliability & Cloud Infrastructure engineer with 17+ years of engineering experience, designing, scaling, and hardening mission-critical systems globally.
I'm a Staff Site Reliability Engineer with 17+ years of engineering experience (13+ in cloud/SRE), designing, scaling, and hardening mission-critical systems globally. I began my career programming control systems for power generation turbines worldwide before transitioning to cloud infrastructure. Currently at Gusto, I serve as the Staff-level domain owner for Disaster Recovery, setting reliability objectives and aligning product, security, and platform teams on DR strategy across the organization's microservices.
I'm passionate about building reliable, secure infrastructure foundations that enable teams to move fast with confidence. My work spans multi-region disaster-recovery architectures and Infrastructure-as-Code stacks—all serving millions of users. Recognized across teams as a go-to person for infrastructure questions and a trusted mentor, I also founded two internal learning communities (Python Guild and Cloud Security Guild) to fill critical knowledge gaps and foster a culture of continuous learning.
Founded and lead Python Guild, establishing testing standards and best practices across the organization. Hosted ML/AI talks and delivered PM showcases. Created comprehensive testing playbook that reduced Spacelift CLI test runtime by 94% (39.25s → 2.35s) while maintaining 82% coverage.
Co-founded Cloud Security Guild with 50+ monthly attendees, filling critical knowledge gaps in AWS security practices. Delivered comprehensive AWS security presentation and coordinated speakers including security experts from external companies. Recognized as filling a "sorely neglected area" at the organization.
Built automated failover testing platform with dual-path authentication (Keycloak + direct-to-Okta fallback) and comprehensive workflow orchestration. Enabled automated disaster recovery validation for critical production applications, ensuring business continuity during regional outages.
Leveraged Spacelift's GraphQL API to build custom internal CLI from scratch when spacectl fell short, implementing run management, stack operations, shell completion, and interactive confirmations. Integrated Datadog metrics to track adoption of new IaC tooling across 1100+ Terraform stacks, enabling data-driven decisions and velocity forecasting against leadership-imposed deadlines.
Built internal Advent of Code leaderboard web application with REST API integration and real-time rankings. Fostered engineering community engagement and friendly competition across the organization.
Directed company-wide disaster-recovery program, automating multi-region failover tests and cutting RTO from hours to under 20 minutes. Drove cross-region KMS key migration, Aurora global clusters and Redis global replication groups, and bi-directional ECR & image replication. Recovered 5 years of container images after accidental deletion, preventing major service disruption.
Gusto - New York, NY
September 2019 – Present
Compass - New York, NY
February 2019 – August 2019
Beeswax - New York, NY
May 2018 – February 2019
NS1 - New York, NY
September 2017 – April 2018
Greenhouse Software - New York, NY
June 2015 – September 2017
Stocktwits - New York, NY
January 2015 – June 2015
Opower - Arlington, VA
April 2014 – January 2015
Opower - Arlington, VA
September 2012 – March 2014
Alstom Power
June 2008 – August 2012
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA
May 2008
Graduated Cum Laude
"Elena is recognized as an evangelist, thought leader, and partner for the work she does regarding Disaster Recovery."
"Elena routinely goes above and beyond to help with critical projects. Her knowledge, patience, and shared interest in good work made a complex Cloudflare WAF governance project possible, increasing developer velocity and freeing up the security team."
"Elena answered SOC 2 auditor questions concisely and made space for follow-ups. Gusto did not receive any SOC 2 exceptions as a result of how she engaged the audit team."
"Go-to person for infrastructure questions. Elena's expertise and knowledge made critical debugging significantly faster."
"Elena was one of two people recommended for help and mentoring. She's absolutely recognized as a leader in prodsec."
"Elena is modeling all the right traits—patience, enthusiasm, and humility. The Cloud Security Guild is filling a sorely neglected area."
"Elena is hard working, fastidious, attentive, and forward thinking. She occasionally needs to be reminded to put the dishes away."
I'm always interested in hearing about new projects and opportunities. Please get in touch.