Jay Gengelbach

Software Engineer at Vercel

Greater Toronto Area, Canada

About

I'm a software engineering leader who operates across the full stack of both technical and people leadership: - Writing code - Planning and project management - Incident command - Design and architecture - Technical strategy - Mentorship - Org design and staffing strategy - Engineering culture and practices - Executive alignment and advocacy My expertise is in backend and infrastructural software, including web-scale data storage and analysis, resource efficiency, productionization and reliability, and distributed system architecture. In my time at Google and Vercel, I've worked on some of the largest and most complex software systems on the planet. I like to say that I'd rather scale a system from 1 to 10 than build from 0 to 1. I like transforming functional-but-rickety systems for unprecedented scale.

Experience

  • Software Engineer at Vercel
    Jan 2025 - Present · 1 yr 7 mos

    Builds team: making the fastest and safest way to deploy your site

  • Distinguished Engineer at GEICO
    Oct 2024 - Jan 2025 · 4 mos

  • Verily (Full-time · 6 yrs 6 mos)
    • Principal Engineer
      Feb 2024 - Aug 2024 · 7 mos

    • Engineering Director - Data, Translation, and Analytics Platforms
      Sep 2022 - Feb 2024 · 1 yr 6 mos

    • Data Platforms Lead
      Mar 2018 - Oct 2022 · 4 yrs 8 mos

  • Google (Boulder, Colorado, United States)
    • Engineering Manager
      2014 - 2018 · 4 yrs

      I led the backend serving infrastructure team behind Google Now / Proactive Search. I built the team from 3 up to 20 people and managed resources and efficiency for a serving system that received billions of queries per day.

    • Staff Software Engineer
      2010 - 2014 · 4 yrs

      I led one of the backend teams behind Google Payments. I owned the storage system that held account data for Adwords and Google Play customers, and took the system safely through a large-scale zero-downtime storage system migration.

    • Senior Software Engineer
      2006 - 2010 · 4 yrs

      I worked on Google's cluster monitoring infrastructure, providing clear-box monitoring tools to help Site Reliability Engineering build some of the most highly-available consumer services on the planet.