Carlos was first hired in 2007 into the US News team as one of backend engineers to work on http://news.yahoo.com/. He joined when the team was in it’s growing phase (from 2 in 2001, 5 in 2005). He started off working on fixing bugs, adding features to the modules on the web site. Then helped to work on the CMS system. Then taking on the local news component, taking over some of the mail to friend feature for Yahoo!. Taking on a leadership role to lead an entire backend rebuild of Yahoo! News in 2008. He demonstrated a huge capacity to learn, to absorb any amount of work.
Because he was so rock solid, the leadership team gave him 2 of the biggest projects. One was to launch the 2nd content optimization effort in the company after the homepage (www.yahoo.com) in Yahoo! News. Another was to deploy a pet project of mine called 100X to be able to scale up the Yahoo! News capacity by 100X the normal load in case of a huge news spike event. He was left alone to handle everything on the projects and delivered it like they were nothing that challenging. Rock solid performer!
In 2009, he decided to try his hands as an engineering manager and lead a team to transition the entire US News to a Taiwan team. He did this by rallying his team to do hands on training, documentation and 1 month physical shadowing in Taiwan. Again, flawless!
In 2010, he lead a content team to work on the backend of an ambitious project to enhancement an brand new version of a content system which will shape all Media properties at Yahoo! from now on.
After 4.5 years, Carlos has decided to join a start up. I wish the best of luck to him. As he has told me, this is the longest (by 2 times) he has stayed with a company. I thank him for everything he has done for Yahoo!
Top 3 things I remember about Carlos
- One of the few Cal grads I work with and we both did our school proud!
- Hula dancing
- Smart, nice guy to be around. Always positive energy. Adds to whatever team he is on and doesn’t take away energy. Seriously.. always!
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