Katie Hockman

Mercari - Software Engineer | Tokyo | May 2024 - current

Platform Group

• Technical Lead for company-wide notification service, serving tens of millions of emails, push notifications, SMS, and in-app notifications daily. Focus on team leadership, software and systems modernization and stability, multi-region support, vendor management, and incident handling.

• Technical Lead for company-wide Go language standardization across 7+ orgs establishing shared libraries and facilitating inner source maintenance. Modernizing critical libraries, partnering directly with internal teams, and developing Mercari's first Go-based MCP server.

• Technical Lead to automate code and infrastructure scanning for production readiness, a top pain point for platform users and a top-level OKR. Identified the problem, designed the technical solution, led the engineering team, and was the primary code contributor and reviewer.

• Established incident tenets for all engineers at the company.

Datadog - Engineering Manager | New York | April 2022 - March 2024

APM Client Libraries Go Tracing Team (Application Performance Monitoring)

• Engineering Manager and Tech Lead for a team of 6 software engineers, junior to senior, owning the Tracing components of Datadog's Go (Golang) Open Source Client Libraries and the Datadog Trace Agent.

• Organizational leadership (40+ eng) with data privacy and OpenTelemetry - involved with W3C context propagation and 128-bit trace ids, and led OpenTelemetry API support.

• Established team processes from scratch using Agile methodologies. This has led to better collaboration, quarterly planning, and execution.

• Established software launch requirements for the organization.

Google - Senior Software Engineer | New York | June 2015 - Februrary 2022

Go Language Team, Go Security Team: August 2018 - February 2022

• Tech Lead for fuzzing, which supports Go developers in finding and fixing bugs and security exploits in their programs. This is the first programming language to provide this functionality in its standard toolchain, and promotes the security of the Go ecosystem. When I began this work, it was the 3rd most upvoted proposal on the Go issue tracker.

  I was the lead of this ~2 year effort at all stages of development. I authored the API and CLI design, and led implementation, product planning, documentation, public communications, and launch.

  I have spoken on two Go Time podcasts about fuzzing (#145, #187), authored a blog post, and contributed to the tutorial.

• Tech Lead for production implementation of the module mirror, checksum database, and index (proxy.golang.org, sum.golang.org, and index.golang.org respectively), using the ecosystem and crytographic designs authored by Russ Cox and Filippo Valsorda. These are the default services used by all Go developers for secure, reliable source code downloads. Go is the first language to support downloads in this way, and this work has inspired other languages to consider using similar techniques.

  I led a senior engineering team in design, development, product planning, and launch. Drove cross-team collaboration with product, legal, leadership, and the open source community. I was a primary contributor to the checksum database, which ensured consistency of Go module fetches across the entire ecosystem. This involved integrating with Trillian (the Merkle tree backing the transparency log), and implementing tiling of Trillian's data to store and serve through the frontend.

  This service has an SLO of 5 9s, and I was a member of the oncall team for 2.5 years.

  I traveled around the world to present the details of this project, and authored a blog post.

• Triaged and fixed vulnerabilities in the Go standard library, implemented hardening measures and security fixes as a member of the Go security team.

Accessibility Internal Tools Team: August 2015 - August 2018

• This was a brand new team that we built from the ground up. I worked on a 20% basis with a group of other 20%ers for about a year before I transitioned to the team full time. During the development of this team, I was involved with the hiring of other engineers, as well as a Technical Program Manager.
• Trained engineers/UX, fixed accessibility issues, and facilitated systemic change in the organization to make workplace tools accessible and usable for employees with disabilities. Worked on tools to track accessibility progress across the organization.
• This team helped me hone my cross-functional leadership skills. As part of engaging with other teams at Google, I worked with management, engineers, and UX experts across the organization to get their team up-to-speed and passionate about accessibility. The goal was to make teams self-sustainable and set up for success in the long-term.

Supply Chain APIs Team: June 2015 - August 2016

• Implemented Java APIs and services to support Google supply chain. This work involved writing business logic on top of external APIs. I owned the integration work involved with supporting new shipping carriers for return slips of Google orders.
• I was a member of the oncall team, and I partnered with Site Reliability Engineers to onboard them to work with the team.
• While on this team, I worked 20% with the accessibility team (a collaboration with the org's VP) which was an effort that I eventually transitioned to full-time in 2016.

Miscellanous responsibilities

• Mentored several junior engineers during my time at Google, both formally and informally.
• Hosted two interns, and co-hosted an engineering resident.
• Conducted over 50 technical interviews, both over the phone, and in-person, and been a part of the hiring decisions for several different roles at Google.
• Participated in promotion committees.
• Taught several accessibility sessions to new hires.