Max Spevack

max.spevack {at} gmail.com // linkedin

Amazon Web Services

I lead both the Amazon Linux organization (again!) and Amazon's Open Source Program Office.

The Linux organization is accountable for the Amazon Linux AMI (AL1) and Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) products used by internal and external customers in public EC2, as well as the internal Amazon Linux versions used to power servers for AWS and Amazon’s retail business. We run a general-purpose repository system used to publish content (including Amazon Linux repositories and images) to regions and datacenters. We own Bottlerocket, an EC2 product and open source Linux-based OS for hosting containers.

The Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is accountable for Amazon’s consumption, usage, and distribution of open source software. We work with company stakeholders to analyze, organize, manage, and help to minimize Amazon’s accrued open source risk. We build the tools and processes that enable engineers to meet the requirements of the licenses in their open source code. We advise Amazon strategically, creating frameworks to decide what we will and will not open source. We participate in the due diligence process for mergers & acquisitions (M&A) that Amazon considers. We manage Amazon’s GitHub and other third-party open source infrastructure.

Google

I led the GCE engineering teams accountable for:

• KVM, both in Google's kernel and the relationship with the upstream community.
• Managing, building, qualifying, and measuring GCE host kernel quality and deployment velocity.
• New product introduction and end-to-end customer experience for CPUs, GPUs, memory-optimized instances, and nested virtualization.
• Live migration functionality and efficiency.

Customer-facing launches include Skylake and Cascade Lake CPUs, SAP-certified large memory instances (ultramem, m2), Nvidia GPUs (V100, P4 with GRID support, T4), and nested virtualization. The team received four of Google's "Cloud Feat of Engineering" awards for response to Spectre / Meltdown, response to L1TF, nested virtualization, and the SAP-certified large-memory instances.

My mission was building and growing an excellent team to deliver on the scope discussed above. That started with focus on the team members, nurturing their careers and ensuring that they had opportunities and feedback necessary to grow and be promoted. A healthy team enabled customer focus, and I modeled a culture of ownership, precision, transparency, and organization for the team.

The team grew from 7 to 25 engineers and split into 3 distinct sub-teams with a management structure under me. I shepherded 13 engineers successfully through the promotion process.

Amazon Web Services

As part of the EC2 organization, I led the team accountable for Amazon Linux -- a custom Linux offering available as a public EC2 image and as an internal server OS for both AWS and Amazon's retail business.

The team's primary objective was to build, test, deploy, and support multiple versions of Amazon Linux. This included feature development and integration with EC2, building kernel and userspace packages, security updates, and deploying packages and images. In addition to the OS, the team owned the infrastructure and tooling that allowed us to build packages, compose images, stage repositories, perform automated testing, and gather usage and operational metrics.

I spent about a year simultaneously managing two distinct teams -- the Amazon Linux team discussed above, and the team responsible for qualifications of new EC2 instance types and platforms. During that time, the qualifications team developed tooling, test coverage, and reporting for the T2, C4, and D2 launches. I assisted with the hiring of a manager to transition the qualifications team over to, and I helped with onboarding, training, and a smooth handoff of responsibilities.

In addition to my primary role, I spent 18 months as part of the EC2 Operations team. I was responsible for a weekly summary of all EC2 operational issues including discussion of customer impacting events, status of key metrics, and overall EC2 operational health.

I grew and led teams of 20+ in size, built an organizational and management structure for the team, and shepherded 9 engineers successfully through the promotion process.

Red Hat

The Fedora Project is a collaboration between Red Hat and a worldwide community of free software contributors. Its flagship project is the Fedora Linux distribution. Fedora also serves as Red Hat's open research and development lab, and is the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and many other Linux distributions.

As Fedora Project Leader, I was responsible for day to day management of the Fedora Project, including both Red Hat employees and community contributors. This required both individual and team-based leadership in various areas, such as:

• Engineering, quality assurance, and operations.
• Marketing and brand strategy.
• Community building and community relations.
• Internal and external communications, including all press inquiries and other public-relations issues.
• Legal and financial issues, including budgets and staffing.
• Long-term strategy, vision, and competitive analysis.
• Laying the groundwork for the growth of the Fedora team inside Red Hat, and ultimately leading the transition of the team to its next-generation of leadership.

After two years as Fedora Project Leader, I led the process of splitting the role into several parts -- a continued Fedora Project Leader role, a new Fedora Engineering Manager role, and a new Open Source Community Architecture team, which I was given the opportunity to lead. This was a global team, the goal of which was to facilitate the highly leveraged growth, development, and success of communities strategic to Red Hat's business and brand. Examples of this included:

• Ensuring that the free software community was an equal partner in the creation of Red Hat's products, and that the Open Source Way was institutionalized and its value understood and accepted as crucial to Red Hat's sustainability. My sessions at Red Hat's new hire orientation consistently received excellent feedback.
• Stewardship and senior-level leadership of the Fedora Project, including continued management of the Fedora Project's global budget.
• The intersection of the Open Source Way and educators and educational institutions, enabling the founding of the Teaching Open Source community.

A major part of these roles was public communication. I conducted interviews with LWN, Slashdot, and Linux.com. I was twice a guest on the Linux Link Tech Show. I blogged and I gave interviews to various websites. I spoke about the Fedora Project at many events, including keynotes at FUDCon, Ohio Linux Fest, the inaugural Athens Digital Week, and Southeast Linux Fest 2010.

During 2008 and 2009, I lived in Amsterdam for ~18 months while leading Red Hat's community efforts in that region.

As a member of the Red Hat Network group, I had a variety of leadership, engineering, and QA responsibilities.

Verisign

Education

BS Computer Science, Stanford University, 2002.