Crisis Engineering

Matthew Weaver helps leaders solve both urgent and long-term strategic problems. While many of his recent engagements have been confidential, he was recognized by Fast Company for his role in building the first Digital Service team for the U.S. government after rescuing Healthcare.gov. At USDS, he led successful technical interventions across 11 federal agencies, with budgets ranging from $100 million to $1.2 trillion. In a previous role, weaver provided long-term strategy support to leadership at Devoted Health, a health care startup serving older Americans with a next generation health plan. He also spent several years at Fastly, where he improved the safety, performance, and resilience of the infrastructure – enabling them to handle the 800+ billion network requests they receive each day. Before his work in the public sector, weaver spent 9 years at Google, where he helped establish the site reliability engineering (SRE) discipline. These principles and practices are now widely used across modern technology companies to build ultra-scalable and reliable software systems. In his spare time, weaver enjoys taking things apart, understanding how they work, and fixing them.

Carla likes debugging complex systems, especially those made of both software and humans. Her work spans Google and multiple federal agencies with the United States Digital Services. Most recently, Carla led a team at Fastly to fix systemic resilience problems. Her team’s work addressed a widespread outage, retained customers, and dramatically improved recovery time of core caching systems. During her 12-year tenure at Google, she was responsible for keeping hundreds of petabytes of data safe and accessible. She also helped establish site reliability engineering (SRE) principles that are still used by Google and most modern tech companies. Along the way, she quietly swapped out major system components and managed several incidents that didn’t end up on the front page of the newspaper. During the 2014 to 2015 open enrollment season, Carla led the operations for Healthcare.gov. There, she diagnosed failures at all layers of the system, from the Linux kernel to the White House Office of General Counsel. She also worked with the Defense Digital Service to introduce DevOps on the next-generation GPS ground control system (OCX). Carla’s specialties are designing resilient systems, increasing scalability, distributing data storage, and finding the simplest path through a mess.

Mikey helped lead the Healthcare.gov rescue, for which he was featured on the cover of TIME magazine. Afterwards, President Obama appointed him Deputy Chief Information Officer of the United States. Part of this involved Mikey being charged with establishing the United States Digital Service (USDS) to bring America’s top technologists into government and solve its hardest and most pressing IT challenges. In addition to recruiting hundreds of developers and designers to join the federal government for tours of duty, he has led the successful transformation of a major, multi-million dollar IT project at nearly every federal agency. Prior to USDS, Mikey served as one of the earliest Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at Google. There, he spent 8 years growing and managing a team of SREs – the kind of engineer responsible for ensuring one of the world’s most ubiquitous websites is safe and functioning, 24/7/365. Most recently, Mikey and the Layer Aleph team helped solve California’s unemployment claim crisis. Within 45 days of their engagement, claim automation increased from 60% to more than 94%.

Marina’s specialty is solving big, painful problems that others would rather avoid — particularly those that involve a backlog. As the former CTO of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Marina and her team drastically improved veterans’ access to care and services. Her teams’ effort helped increase veteran trust in the agency by 25%. Marina has been at the forefront of multiple hundred-million-dollar IT rescue and transformation projects. These efforts often went beyond restoration and propelled agencies into the future with processes like instant claims. Most recently, Marina and her team at Layer Aleph helped Governor Newsom solve California’s unemployment claim crisis as part of a “Strike Team.” Within 45 days of their involvement, claim automation increased from 60% to more than 94%. Prior roles and engagements include being the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Department of Education; the owner of the business process re-engineering firm, The Type-A Way; and author of the books “Business Efficiency for Dummies” and “Hack Your Bureaucracy.” As a current fellow at New America, Marina also spends much of her time working with practitioners across the country to assess and modernize the U.S. foster care system.