I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at Atlassian, based in Sydney. I’ve been here for over a decade, joining as a graduate developer in 2015 and growing through senior IC roles into management. Most of that time has been in and around Jira: I’ve worked on the developer tools space, React performance on the Jira frontend, and microservice extraction projects in the backend.

I currently lead one of two teams on Jira’s Issue Backend — about 17 engineers extracting the core issue API from the Jira monolith into a new service backed by a DynamoDB document model. Our sibling team owns the new service; my team owns the migration path — moving every read and write of the issue object onto the new system without disrupting the product.

Before software, I studied Philosophy at the University of Otago, where I picked up a Bachelor of Arts and a Postgraduate Diploma. My PG Dip dissertation was on Homotopy Type Theory and the foundations of mathematics, which is how I found my way into formal methods, type systems, and eventually a graduate role in industry via a Diploma for Graduates in Computer Science.

These days I think a lot about scaling engineering teams with the right balance of processes, and how we can best incorporate AI into the software development lifecycle without compromising reliability.

I write about that kind of thing here, when I find the time.

You can reach me at contact@gene-t-taylor.com, or find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.

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_{^{Header photo by Tomas Sobek / CC BY.}}