About

I’m Rudy Faile – a Senior Systems Engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and more.

My day starts with checking alerts and saying good morning to my team. From there, it’s a mix of triaging requests from across the company, investigating infrastructure issues, monitoring systems, and working on longer-term projects. A request might take ten minutes or ten weeks. Either way, the goal is the same: return accurate information, set things up properly, and get back to people fast.

Right now, I’m leading a large-scale infrastructure migration moving over a thousand servers to a modern stack involving Kubernetes, new storage architecture, and careful coordination of stateful workloads where data loss isn’t an option. It’s the kind of project where you’re balancing speed with precision across hundreds of moving pieces.

I’ve been in tech since 2003, back in the Flash and ActionScript days. I spent eight years in the U.S. Navy, earned a Master’s degree from the University of Redlands, and worked my way from mobile development to IT director roles before landing at Automattic. It’s been a winding road, but every stop taught me something I still use today.

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Why I Write

I learned most of what I know alone, and it was lonely. I want to be the resource I wished I had: someone who can explain things clearly and honestly without gatekeeping. I like solving problems, helping people, and automating things.

That’s what drives most of what I write about here: infrastructure at scale, career growth, and building things for fun.

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Outside of Work

I’ve been married to my wonderful wife for 11 years and we have two kids. I’m big into fitness and wellness. I exercise every day, cold plunge and sauna included. When I’m not at a terminal, I’m usually playing with my kids, building indie games with raylib and C, or reading. My favorite series include The Dresden Files and Red Rising.