Tara Hernandez

Nerd Manager, Dev Process Wonk

San Francisco Bay Area

About

I love finding new and interesting ways to help companies get better at shipping software. I occasionally write thoughts about engineering management on Medium (https://medium.com/@tequilarista).

Experience

  • Lecturer at University of California, Santa Cruz
    Apr 2026 - Present · 3 mos

    Associated with the UCSC Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development

  • Vice President Developer Productivity at MongoDB
    May 2022 - Present · 4 yrs 2 mos

    Lead MongoDB’s global development infrastructure organization which spans North America, APAC, and EMEA. Deliver platforms that power software development at large scale — including build systems, test frameworks, CI/CD infra, DevSecOps, performance analytics and other systems in support of on-prem and SaaS products software development lifecycle. Onboarded OpenTelemetry and observability best practices as well as Generative AI tooling into the developer ecosystem. Ongoing commitment to leadership development.

  • Senior Engineering Manager, Google Cloud Platform at Google
    Mar 2018 - May 2022 · 4 yrs 3 mos

    Run the Developer Platform Engineering team focusing on GCP Serverless technologies and the Anthos hybrid-cloud development platform. Also do customer engagements with regards to software development life cycles, engineering culture, and have a strong bent towards DevOps methodologies. Cross functional team builder. DEI advocate and speaker. Google representative for Technical Oversight Committee, Continuous Delivery Foundation.

  • Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab
    Dec 2014 - Mar 2018 · 3 yrs 4 mos

    Oversee both the Systems Engineering team responsible for the production environments of our virtual reality platforms, as well as the Build Engineering team responsible for the developer environment and deployment pipelines. Tasks include project and vendor management, employee growth and mentoring, cross-company and third-party collaborations and guidance on issues around performance, security, and strategic planning around production costs.

  • Senior Engineering Manager Continuous Deployment Engineering at Lithium Technologies
    Sep 2013 - Nov 2014 · 1 yr 3 mos

    Oversaw creation of new lighweight dev process model from monolithic environment via Subversion and Bamboo to self-contained team environments using Git and Jenkins. Helped introduce Chef as a configuration management scheme and oversaw early adoption efforts for cloud deployments in AWS and OpenStack. Moderator of Lithium Brain Trust, fostering cross-functional discussions between all engineering technical leadership. Member of Patent and Open Source Committee. Moderator of Lithium's Women in Engineering Initiative.