About Me
I'm Sekou M. Doumbouya, a technical lead and Senior Staff Software Engineer focused on infrastructure that has to scale safely (not the basketball player). With over 20 years in infrastructure and platform engineering, I have built cloud platforms, network architectures, capacity systems, disaster recovery tooling, and the operating mechanisms that help teams use them well.
At Pinterest, I lead architecture across multi-account AWS, next-generation networking, compute-platform dependencies, IP address strategy, and disaster recovery. My work has helped reduce a critical recovery path from 20 days to 8 hours, deliver major cloud cost optimizations, and turn infrastructure risks into measurable roadmaps with clear owners.
I am also exploring the next infrastructure layer for software engineering. I built Anvil, an open-source, local-first task ledger for humans and AI coding agents, and I write about agent orchestration, evaluation, local model serving, and reliable execution across runtimes.
How I Lead
Senior technical leadership means setting direction while staying close enough to the work to make sound decisions. I believe in leaving teams more capable than I found them.
Lead by Example
Player-coach who tackles complex problems alongside the team through design reviews, prototypes, incident analysis, and implementation.
Small Teams, Big Impact
4-6 person pods maximize velocity and ownership. Tight feedback loops beat large committees.
Mentorship as Multiplier
Helping others level up compounds into organizational gains. I measure success by team capability growth.
High-Trust, Inclusive Culture
Psychological safety enables high performance. Diverse perspectives make better systems.
Cross-Functional Connector
Bridging engineering with product, design, and data science. Shared context creates alignment.
Strategic Approach
Staff+ engineers influence through expertise and trust, not organizational authority. These principles guide how I drive technical direction.
Aligning Tech with Business
Translate strategy into executable plans, communicate technical realities back to leadership.
Looking Around Corners
Anticipate scaling challenges before they're urgent. Proactive architecture over reactive firefighting.
Influence Without Authority
Lead through credibility and trust as a senior IC. Build consensus across org boundaries.
Builder at Heart
Drive change through tangible results, not slide decks. Ship working systems that prove the vision.
Technical Focus Areas
Where I invest my engineering energy. These five domains represent the intersection of my expertise and current interests.
Platform Engineering & Developer Experience
Building internal platforms that treat developers as customers. Self-service infrastructure that accelerates delivery.
- Platform-as-product mindset with clear value propositions
- Golden-path solutions abstracting infrastructure complexity
- Self-service CI/CD, monitoring, and provisioning capabilities
- FinOps integration for cost visibility and optimization
Success metrics
Lead time, onboarding friction, infrastructure costs
Site Reliability Engineering & Scalability
Designing distributed systems that stay up at scale. From SLOs to chaos engineering.
- Distributed systems and multi-region deployments
- Performance optimization and database scalability
- Observability: dashboards, SLOs, root cause analysis
- Chaos engineering and automated recovery patterns
Success metrics
Availability, latency percentiles, incident recovery time
Agentic Infrastructure & Developer Systems
Building reliable systems for humans and AI coding agents to plan, execute, verify, and preserve work across runtimes.
- Local-first project state and evidence-gated completion
- Agent orchestration across model and coding runtimes
- Evaluation, failure analysis, and quality feedback loops
- Local model serving, routing, and capacity experiments
Success metrics
Verified completion, task throughput, reliability, and cost
Cloud Networking & Capacity
Making growth constraints visible early, then designing network and address-management systems that scale safely.
- Multi-account and multi-region network architecture
- IPv4 runway modeling and IPv6 migration strategy
- Centralized prefix management and IP address telemetry
- Routing, egress, security, and cloud cost optimization
Success metrics
Capacity runway, reliability, onboarding time, and unit cost
Cloud-Native Evolution
Evaluating emerging technologies and driving adoption of what actually works.
- Evaluating emerging CNCF projects for fit
- Serverless, edge computing, and orchestration advances
- Infrastructure-as-code and security automation
- PoC development for promising technologies
Success metrics
Adoption success rate, innovation velocity, technical debt reduction
External Engagement
Building community beyond the day job. I believe senior engineers have a responsibility to share knowledge and lift others.
Speaking & Thought Leadership
- ● Conference talks on cloud architecture, SRE, and agentic systems
- ● Technical blog posts and case studies
- ● Podcast co-host: AI with Friends
Community & Open Source
- ● Contributing to infrastructure tools and frameworks
- ● Developer evangelism and internal talks shared externally
- ● Building bridges between practitioners and tooling vendors
DEI Advocacy
- ● Active mentor at /dev/color
- ● Building inclusive engineering cultures
- ● Speaking on inclusive leadership in tech
Core Competencies
Cloud & Platform
- Multi-Region Architecture
- AWS / OCI / GCP
- Kubernetes / EKS / ECS
- Terraform / IaC
Networking & Reliability
- Network Architecture
- VPC Design
- SRE Practices
- Observability Stack
Agentic Systems & Automation
- Agent Orchestration
- Evidence-Gated Workflows
- Local Model Serving
- AI Developer Tooling
Leadership & Strategy
- Technical Strategy
- Team Building
- Cross-Functional Leadership
- Mentorship
Education & Development
Penn State University
Schuylkill Haven, PA · 1999–2002
Emerge Global Executive Leadership Program
Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Community & Awards
AI with Friends
Weekly podcast breaking down complex technology topics through candid conversations.
/dev/color
Mentoring and supporting Black engineers and other underrepresented technologists navigating senior-level careers in tech.
LiveOps Amsterdam Datacenter Creation Award
Recognition for excellence in datacenter infrastructure design and implementation.