About me
My name is Payam Azadi (he/him), and this is my blog focused on issues in software engineering management. Whether you’re a software engineer interested in management track, an engineering manager, or a product owner or project manager, I hope the posts here will help you with your job and with your career. These are written from my experience and reviewed by many of the mentors who helped me get to where I am today.
I started my career in high school as an intern for a website company called DealerOn which serves the automotive industry. My first role was writing car buying guides, then tech support, and finally software engineering. Working for an incredible boss, I focused on user experience engineering, business process, business intelligence, and what would later come to be known as site reliability engineering. In 2015 I left the company, having helped lead it from 100 to over 1500 websites over the prior 5 years. Then, I did a 6 month road trip around the United States where I visited over 30 National Parks and developed a love for the outdoors.
Next I worked on a federal contract for the Government Accountability Office, a branch of US Congress, which identifies waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies. There I helped develop a system called NewBlue which revolutionized the way government auditors authored, fact checked, reviewed, and published agency recommendations.
From there I went to National Geographic where I helped rebuild and relaunch Webby-nominated Your Shot, a global photo commmunity with over 2 million photographers, prior to the Disney acquisition which shuttered it.
Most recently, I worked for Anheuser-Busch InBev, where I was the engineering director for Site Reliability Engineering in the Global B2B division. There, we increased deployment frequency from twice per month to hundreds per month, tripled gender diversity, launched in 6 new countries, doubled our revenue footprint to $6 billion per year, and did a code-first, multi-site cloud migration.
I live in Rockville, Maryland with my orange tabby Shaytoon (it means “little devil” in Farsi). I spend my time writing, preparing for a trek of the Appalachian Trail, and catching up on 19th and early 20th century literature. I earned my computer science degree with a focus on human computer interaction from the University of Maryland in 2012, and my black belt in Tae Kwon Do in 2017. I speak French and Farsi and love ethnic cuisine from around the world.