Software Engineer · DevOps & SRE

Tiexin Guo

I design, build, and automate cloud infrastructure — and I stay hands-on while doing it. CNCF Ambassador, ex-Canonical, ex-AWS.

Chengdu, China guotiexin@gmail.com
Read my résumé Project portfolio GitHub
  • 3× CNCF Ambassador, three years in a row
  • 10+ yrs DevOps, SRE, and cloud architecture
  • 30k+ users of my Chrome extension in the EU
  • 200+ engineers interviewed while scaling teams

About

Hello world. I'm a software engineer who has spent the last decade in DevOps, SRE, and cloud architecture — and the decade before that writing application code.

I majored in computer science and technology at Tsinghua University, and started my career as a full-stack engineer back before the term "full-stack" had been invented. Over the years I have mostly written Python and Go, with a fair amount of Node/React/Angular, Java, PHP, C, Perl, and — of course — shell.

After about eight years of full-stack work I moved into DevOps, SRE, and cloud architecture, which coincided with relocating from China to Europe. I spent five years working in Estonia and Germany before moving back to China in mid-2021. I'm now based in Chengdu, though I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the world.

I have worked in state-owned enterprises, global IT giants, local and international start-ups, and consultancies — across finance, insurance, automotive, logistics, mobile app analytics, and cloud. I got into cloud, DevOps, and agile after a few genuinely successful cloud migrations and DevOps transformations, and I have been doing it ever since.

How I Work

I have been leading in globally distributed teams since 2013, but I'm not the kind of lead who sits behind a desk writing documents and filing Jira tickets. I lead by example and spend more than half of my time hands-on, writing code every day.

I'm experienced in hiring, interviewing, scaling teams, and building engineering culture — in 2018 and 2019 alone I interviewed over 200 candidates for engineering roles and grew a cloud team from 20 to 80 people.

I believe in sharing knowledge and enabling the people around me. I share constantly inside and across teams, I write about cloud and DevOps, and I regularly present and demo to customers, often to C-level audiences. I have also been invited to speak at local and international conferences and meetups.

Outside Work

I do open-source projects in my spare time — have a look at my GitHub and copy-paste anything you find useful. One of them is a Chrome extension with more than 30,000 users in the EU. Away from the keyboard I'm into road trips, driving, cycling, and photography.

Elsewhere