engineering

When I joined Splunk in 2015, I was quickly tasked with reviving a twice-failed initiative — the creation of a shared component strategy for the core product. At the time, the product was growing rapidly, but also becoming increasingly bloated and monolithic. Feature teams were innovating, but in silos, leading to duplicated code, inconsistent operations, and mounting technical debt. To keep scaling, we needed a way to build once and reuse across domains — especially as new products like ITSM and SIEM started to share similar analytical needs....

At Splunk, cloud sales teams faced a recurring nightmare — not that customers wouldn’t buy, but that we couldn’t fulfill what they purchased. The issue wasn’t demand. It was execution. Despite having invested heavily in elasticity and declarative configuration, order fulfillment remained brittle. The result? Delayed activations, broken provisioning flows, and in some quarters, missed revenue targets — not for lack of product-market fit, but due to gaps in automation and process....

In earlier posts, we discussed how Splunk Cloud evolved from a stateful monolith into an elastic, cloud-native platform. But elasticity alone wasn’t enough. A lingering Achilles’ heel remained — configuration management. Splunk’s on-prem model split cluster configuration across three major roles: ingestion, indexing, and search. Admins managed these settings manually, often SSHing into servers to copy or update config files. While workable in customer-controlled environments, this model completely broke down in the cloud....

The behavioral question, “How do you handle conflict?” has become a staple in engineering interviews. While it’s tempting to give a simple answer about being agreeable, that misses the point entirely. At the senior levels of engineering, conflict isn’t something to be avoided; it’s a catalyst. Disagreements, when managed correctly, are the crucibles where the strongest, most resilient technical solutions are forged. My approach isn’t about finding a middle ground or ensuring everyone leaves happy....

At Splunk, our transition from a customer-hosted, on-premise model to a cloud-native architecture brought fundamental challenges — both technical and cultural. One of the earliest and most pressing concerns was infrastructure cost. As a company historically dependent on customers provisioning their own compute, we faced a steep learning curve in operating and scaling workloads efficiently in the cloud. Meanwhile, competitors were already cloud-native — built from the ground up for elasticity and low operational overhead....

While at Splunk, transitioning a monolithic on-premise product into a scalable, multi-tenant cloud platform was a transformative engineering endeavor. Among the most complex and impactful areas of change was our approach to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). The legacy model: manual, ticket-based, and weeks-long; was incompatible with the velocity required for cloud-native innovation. The Problem 1. Manual Releases Bottleneck Innovation Our release process was fragmented and painfully slow. A typical release cycle involved:...

In 2020, the world changed overnight. Conference rooms became kitchen counters, watercooler chats turned into chat boxes, and our wardrobes quietly redefined “business casual.” Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex went from “nice‑to‑have” to cultural artifact in weeks. Yet the old rules of social chemistry didn’t copy‑paste cleanly. In a 1‑to‑1 video call there’s nowhere to hide, no pastry table to rescue you, and definitely no way to pretend you “just happened to bump into” your boss....

(Read Part 1: Deep Alignment) In part two of the Leading Change series with Craig Ross from Verus Global, we explore how to lead with greater self-awareness and intentional focus. We learn how the mind reacts to pressure, how emotions shape our reality, and how to shift energy from blame to action using the Event Energy Map—a practical tool to help build ourselves and others a shared reality. Stay Focused in High-Stakes Conversations The mind can focus on only one thing at a time....

Last week I had an opportunity to participate in a powerful leadership workshop led by Craig Ross from Verus Global. It was energizing, insightful, and packed with practical tools to help grow as a collaborative leader. We focused on two core imperatives that must work together: Business: 3-6 months outcomes, like launching our new enterprise cloud platform and modernizing our existing product portfolio. Human: How we work together to get there, through collaboration, accountability, and leadership that’s both empowered and empowering....

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) has taken the world by storm, with Generative AI becoming the mantra of Silicon Valley. However, many people, including myself, find it challenging to truly understand this emerging field. Is it simply about enabling conversations with an all-knowing android? And how does it differ from Machine Learning, the practical application dominating the scene today? GPT is a type of Large Language Model (LLM), a category of machine learning model trained on massive text corpora....