Hi there! My name is Lesley Cordero and I’m a Staff Engineer & Tech Lead at The New York Times.

I’m a Software Engineer by training and a community builder and writer by passion. I'm also a an organizer & frequent speaker within the Platform Engineering & Reliability Engineering space.

I've worked with and at organizations of varying sizes, exposing me to a variety of technical and architectural challenges. My specialization, however, is in distributed systems, particularly service-oriented architectures with varying communication techniques.

Byte Consulting

I began my career at Byte Academy as a Data Engineer focused on building CPython based ETL/ELT pipelines that integrate clients within the edtech space. This provided me a strong foundation for tackling tough data problems that I carried through the rest of my career.

Teachers Pay Teachers

Working with engineers at other companies led me to my role on the Google for Education team, where I led technical integrations with third-party companies.

I worked at Google during the transition to remote learning in 2020 and dealt with technical challenges I never thought I'd see in my career. These challenges instilled a deep appreciation for reliability management and has been my primary problem space since.

The New York Times

When I transitioned to Teachers Pay Teachers as a Senior Engineer, I focused on technical & organizational challenges as a Tech Lead or Tech Lead Manager, taking both a bottom up & top down approach to driving sociotechnical change.

I began and executed on reliability focused efforts that included improving our observability footprint, adopting Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and using chaos engineering to test on production environments.

Google for Education

Since I joined The New York Times as a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead, I have focused on long-term technical vision & strategy across multiple teams and organizations, as well as department level initiatives.

As a Tech Lead for our Operations Engineering organization, I’ve focused on standardization within that domain. Observability being my deep focus area, I’ve driven telemetry standardization, OpenTelemetry adoption, and providing scalable ways to spread knowledge around reliability management.

I’m currently focused on production readiness for the U.S. General Election and improving our full-stack observability footprint.