Jay Wallace
Engineering Manager at DoorDash
United States
Overview
Work Experience
Engineering Manager
2021 - Current
Built DoorDash’s Cloud Infrastructure & Platforms organization from the ground up, hiring and leading a group of engineers through one of the company’s fastest periods of growth. I defined the team’s charter, mission, and vision, and built the entire hiring pipeline, writing job reqs, designing interview loops, and setting the bar for technical and cultural excellence. The team’s core focus is developer velocity, and we delivered scalable self-serve infrastructure platforms, automation, and tooling that helped product teams move faster and with greater confidence.
Staff Engineer
2019 - 2021
Continued building on early Kubernetes and infrastructure work as the platform scaled rapidly to support DoorDash’s hyper-growth. Helped lead the evolution from single-cluster to multi-cluster architecture, drove foundational efforts toward a cell-based architecture, and played a key role in scaling the Compute team from 2 to 10 engineers by hiring senior technical talent and shaping the team’s growth and direction.
Sr. Engineer
2018 - 2019
Joined during a critical inflection point as DoorDash began modernizing its infrastructure. Focused on bringing Kubernetes into production and building core cluster tooling, microservice onboarding flows, and foundational components for traffic, deployment, and observability. Played a key role in helping the platform scale alongside the business.
DoorDash is a food delivery platform that connects customers with local and national businesses.
Raised $2,471,820,000.00 from Durable Capital Partners, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity.
Angel Investor
2021
Weekend Angel I invest in ambitious founders who are building a future where people work less, are better connected, and creativity is fostered. I almost exclusively invest in companies within my own area of expertise, which includes dev tools, infrastructure, and security. Within that scope, my focus is on infrastructure simplification, reducing toil, and improving observability in pursuit of better reliability, security, and efficiency.
Sr. Engineer, NextGen Platforms
2017 - 2018
Part of a small, high-impact team tasked with building Nike’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform from scratch. Focused on platform engineering in Go, infrastructure automation, and CI/CD tooling. Supported organization-wide enablement by designing secure, scalable patterns that accelerated adoption of cloud-native practices across teams. Highlights: • Helped build Nike’s internal Kubernetes platform, including custom extensions in Go and automation around cluster provisioning and lifecycle management. • Developed custom Terraform providers and contributed to Nike’s open-source secret management solution, Cerberus, to meet internal security requirements. • Built CircleCI pipelines with end-to-end testing on ephemeral Kubernetes clusters to ensure safe, repeatable infrastructure changes. • Acted as a subject matter expert on AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, supporting platform adoption across multiple teams. • Partnered with stakeholders across engineering and security to design solutions that met enterprise-scale compliance and operational standards. • Led internal Terraform community of practice and mentored engineers adopting modern infrastructure tooling.
Sr. DevOps Engineer, DevOps Enablement Team, Go To Market
2016 - 2017
Worked on a small team focused on enabling product and engineering teams to adopt DevOps tooling and practices. Supported a range of internal GTM applications by building pipelines, managing infrastructure, and providing hands-on training across key technologies Highlights: • Acted as SME for Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, and Consul, supporting engineering teams through enablement, documentation, and hands-on training. • Owned AWS infrastructure for the Go To Market organization, managed through Troposphere, CloudFormation, and Jenkins pipelines. Migrated org from CF to Terraform • Maintained and extended CI/CD pipelines, configuration management (Chef), monitoring (Sensu), and source control systems (GHE). • Created Packer-Terraform-Jenkins pipelines for provisioning infrastructure, significantly improving reliability and consistency.
Nike is a retail brand that provides the sale of apparel, footwear, sports equipment, and accessory products.
Raised $239,000,000.00 from Pershing Square Capital Management.
Engineering Lead
2016 - 2016
Led the post-sales engineering team for HashiCorp’s Atlas platform, building the support function from the ground up. Acted as the primary escalation point for high-priority customers and played a key role in onboarding, training, and shaping the customer experience during a critical growth phase for the company. Highlights: • Built onboarding and training programs for new support engineers, establishing standards for quality, response time, and technical depth. • Acted as strategic customers' primary technical contact and escalation point, resolving critical issues across AWS, GCP, and the HashiCorp stack. • Partnered with product and engineering teams to prioritize bugs and feature requests based on customer feedback. • Defined internal processes, conducted 1:1s, and ran team retrospectives to improve team efficiency and morale. • Served as a subject matter expert across Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, and the broader HashiCorp ecosystem.
Solutions Engineer
2015 - 2016
Joined HashiCorp as the 10th employee and one of the company’s first pre-sales engineers, supporting the initial commercial rollout of the Atlas platform. Acted as the technical bridge between engineering and prospective customers, driving early adoption of Terraform, Vault, Consul, and more through architecture guidance, demos, and hands-on POCs. Highlights: • Led technical engagement for strategic customers across the full HashiCorp stack—helping close early deals and drive product adoption. • Delivered tailored demos, proof-of-concepts, and technical evaluations that addressed real-world infrastructure challenges. • Provided product feedback and submitted contributions to HashiCorp’s open-source tools, influencing roadmap and usability. • Helped shape the company’s early go-to-market strategy by collaborating closely with sales, product, and founders
Sr. Support Engineer
2013 - 2015
Supported Puppet Enterprise in highly complex, large-scale environments while helping customers adopt modern configuration management and DevOps practices. Acted as the first point of escalation for high-priority accounts and helped shape internal onboarding, training, and documentation efforts as the company scaled. Highlights: • Provided deep technical support for large-scale Puppet deployments across heterogeneous environments with thousands of managed nodes. • Acted as a subject matter expert across a broad toolset, including Puppet, Postgres, Apache, ActiveMQ, Jenkins, Foreman, Vagrant, and various Linux distributions. • Delivered customer education and training on Puppet usage, DevOps practices, and platform architecture. • Wrote internal and external training content for the company’s Learning Management System and helped develop onboarding material for new hires. • Served as the first line of escalation for complex or high-visibility accounts, regularly interfacing with engineering and product to resolve critical issues. • Played an active role in evangelizing infrastructure-as-code workflows and automation best practices to help customers modernize operations. • Acted as DRI for global expansion for follow-the-sun support. Spent over a month in Malaysia onboarding teams in Kuala Lumpur
Co-Founder
2013 - 2015
Co-founded a location-based music discovery startup that aimed to connect people to the sounds of their city. Focused on early product development, pitching, and market validation. While not full-time, the experience gave me a deep understanding of startup dynamics, lean experimentation, and the realities of product-market fit. Highlights: • Collaborated with a co-founder to design and build a mobile-first platform for sharing and discovering local music. • Drove early product development and prototyping, while running lean experiments to validate assumptions around user engagement and virality. • Pitched to local investors and accelerators (Portland and Seattle), gaining experience in startup fundraising, storytelling, and business model development. • Gained hands-on experience in startup lifecycle challenges—from initial idea to launch—and the importance of focus, traction, and distribution. Although bubblr didn’t scale beyond Portland and Seattle, it was a pivotal learning experience that shaped how I think about product velocity, user value, and what it takes to build something people actually want.
System Administrator
2012 - 2013
Managed day-to-day systems operations and infrastructure across a multi-tenant environment supporting financial institutions. Oversaw networking, security, virtualization, and compliance, while acting as the go-to technical resource for internal teams and external banking clients. Highlights: • Administered physical and virtual servers across multiple operating systems and applications, including telephony and internal banking systems. • Maintained PCI compliance and implemented security patches, access policies, and audit procedures to protect sensitive customer data. • Managed network infrastructure, performed routine audits, and monitored system performance to ensure uptime and security. • Acted as technical liaison between in-house developers, external customers, and off-site banking partners, supporting business-critical systems daily. • Deployed and maintained Asterisk VoIP infrastructure for our call center
Geological Technician
2009 - 2011
Supported regional exploration efforts by compiling geological data, digitizing well logs, and building structural models to identify potential oil and gas traps. Worked hands-on with Petrel, Geographix, and other industry tools to assist in subsurface interpretation. Highlights: • Converted historical well data into digital formats (TIFF to LAS), enabling more efficient analysis and correlation across regional datasets. • Built cross sections, called structural tops, and created 3D models to identify traps and fault structures across prospective acreage. • Maintained working interest (WI) and royalty owner ledgers, helping reconcile JIBs and ownership allocations. • Played a key role in streamlining geological workflows using digital tools and mapping software. Although I learned a lot in this role, I realized that oil and gas wasn't for me and made the decision to pivot into my true passion: technology. That shift set me on the path toward infrastructure engineering, platform development, and everything I've been building since.