Resume

silvia@dbsmasher.com · linkedin.com/in/silviabotros · blog.dbsmasher.com

Summary

Senior IC architect with 14+ years operating data infrastructure and reliability programs at internet scale. Currently lead architect on Twilio’s central SRE organization. Co-author of High Performance MySQL, 4th Edition (O’Reilly). Operate as a force multiplier across engineering orgs — shaping architecture decisions, leading reliability programs, and growing the people and patterns that let teams build durable systems. Looking for Distinguished Engineer / Architect roles where the work is horizontal, the systems are critical, and the leverage comes from raising the bar for everyone around me.

Selected Impact

Lead architect on Twilio’s central SRE organization and all company-wide SRE initiatives (2023–present), with cross-product reliability scope across 2,000+ engineers — including the operational review dashboards that drive leadership’s weekly reliability review.
Drove cross-org incident response and post-incident learning at Twilio across 5,000+ engineers during the 2019–2022 stint — turning outages into durable system and process change.
Led Box’s planning to migrate thousands of MySQL databases from on-prem datacenter to Google Cloud — strategy, sequencing, and risk model for one of the largest data-tier moves on the company’s roadmap.
Joined SendGrid as the sole full-time database engineer in 2012; grew and led a team of five and became its architect by 2019, supporting a mail pipeline that delivered trillions of emails.
Co-authored High Performance MySQL, 4th Edition (O’Reilly, 2021) — the current edition of the canonical reference on operating MySQL at scale.
Influential thought leadership on senior-IC craft — “On Being a Principal Engineer” (2019) and a body of LeadDev work — used widely as a reference for the principal-engineer track.

Experience

Twilio — Sr Architect, SRE Org

Oct 2023 – Present · Remote

Architect on the central team reporting to the Chief Architect; horizontal scope across roughly 2,000 engineers and multiple Twilio products.
Lead architect for Twilio’s central SRE organization and its slate of company-wide SRE initiatives — owning the architectural direction that ties reliability programs to engineering practice across the company.
Lead architect on the operational review dashboards used in leadership’s weekly reliability review — defining the metrics, signals, and rollups that drive executive reliability conversations.
Run cross-product reliability assessments; lead incident response and post-incident learning across the org, turning outages into durable system and process change.
Review and shape strategy documents, blueprints, and RFCs across teams; mentor senior and staff engineers on the path to principal and consult on leveling and calibration.

Box — Principal Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Feb 2022 – Oct 2023 · Remote

Led the planning for migrating thousands of MySQL databases from Box’s datacenter to Google Cloud — defined the migration strategy, sequencing, dependency map, and risk model for a multi-year, business-critical data-tier move.
Set technical direction for Box’s data-infrastructure roadmap; partnered with platform, SRE, and product teams to align datastore choices with reliability and cost goals.
Acted as the senior-IC voice on data-architecture review for proposals touching storage, replication, and capacity.

Twilio — Sr Architect, Architecture Team

Feb 2019 – Feb 2022 · Remote

Joined the central architecture team that was formed after Twilio’s acquisition of SendGrid; reported to the Chief Architect with horizontal scope across 5,000+ engineers.
Owned incident response and post-incident learning at company scale — drove the practices that turn outages into systemic improvements rather than one-off fixes.
Reviewed and shaped strategy documents, blueprints, and RFCs across products; specialized in database and data-platform decisions but jumped between projects wherever architectural leverage was highest.
Worked closely with senior engineering leadership on org-wide direction: technology standards, build-vs-buy decisions, and the leveling expectations for principal-and-up engineers.

SendGrid — DBA → Sr Engineer → Principal → Sr Principal Engineer

2012 – Feb 2019 · Remote

Joined as the sole full-time database engineer; built the function from scratch and grew it into a team of five, becoming team lead and architect by 2019.
Designed, deployed, and operated the MySQL data tier behind SendGrid’s mail pipeline — the system delivering trillions of emails for the company’s flagship product.
Drove MySQL architecture from inception to production across the company; owned schema design, replication topology, capacity planning, and the SLOs that the pipeline depended on.
Adapted and rolled out an engineering career-ladder framework (drawing on Rent the Runway’s published model) used to level and calibrate the IC track.
Wrote “On Being a Principal Engineer” (Jan 2019) — the post that defined the role for SendGrid’s IC track and built a wide cross-industry network of principal engineers.
Stayed through SendGrid’s IPO and the 2019 Twilio acquisition; promoted into Senior Principal as part of that transition.

Publications

Botros, S. & Tinley, J. High Performance MySQL, 4th Edition: Proven Strategies for Operating at Scale. O’Reilly Media, 2021.
“On Being a Principal Engineer” — blog.dbsmasher.com, January 2019.
“The reality of being a principal engineer” — LeadDev.
“The road to senior individual contributor” — LeadDev.
“Best practice for seamless product integration” — LeadDev.

Selected Talks & Podcasts

SCaLE 16x — Become a MySQL Guru.
AWS Summit Anaheim — How to Choose a Datastore.
DevOpsDays Los Angeles 2018 — Working with DBAs in a DevOps World.
Arrested DevOps — Principal Engineering with Silvia Botros.
Screaming in the Cloud (Corey Quinn) — career paths and AWS migration.
Ship It! (Changelog #118) — MySQL Performance.