About

Background

I’m a systems engineer and technical leader. I’ve spent the last decade on distributed infrastructure, performance-critical systems, and the engineering organizations that build them.

My technical work is primarily in Go, Rust, and C++, with deep operational experience on ScyllaDB and Cassandra. I care most about the problems where architecture decisions directly affect reliability, cost, and team velocity.

How I Work

Hardware-aware systems design. I optimize where it matters: tail latency, memory layout, binary density. When a managed runtime is the bottleneck, I move to system-level languages — driven by profiling data, not ideology.

Distributed systems operations. Global state with predictable failure modes. I design and operate distributed databases for low-latency reads, tunable consistency, and clear failure boundaries across regions.

Privacy-first architecture. Data residency, zero-trust identity, and compliance controls designed into the system from day one — not retrofitted after a regulatory scare.

Operating Model & Engagements

Beyond full-time leadership, I occasionally structure selective advisory engagements to solve specific architectural bottlenecks or scale engineering organizations.

Principles

Reliability and cost are the same problem. Systems that fail unpredictably are expensive. Systems with explicit failure modes and tight resource control are both cheaper and more reliable.

Measure decision latency, not headcount. Organizational throughput comes from how fast a team can orient, decide, and act — not how many people are in the room.

Complexity must justify itself. Every abstraction, dependency, and layer of indirection needs to earn its place. Simpler systems are easier to operate, debug, and extend.

Credentials

NATO Cyber Defense participant. Entrepreneur First alumnus (2019). Google for Startups Seoul (2018). Active contributor to the Go ecosystem.

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lawzava