Gabe Ochoa

I build things people use, and the teams that ship them.

I lead Transactional Storage at Datadog: nine teams and 66 engineers running the application data platforms under every Datadog product. Postgres, an in-house key-value database, search, replication, and caching.

I started as a mechanical engineer out of Georgia Tech and wanted to build physical things. I built prototypes at Quirky, took products apart at Wink, and somewhere in there learned to actually code. Then to run the infrastructure underneath, at Squarespace and Numina. Then to lead the teams that build it. The title kept changing. The job didn't.

I'm happiest where software meets the physical world: sensors, hardware, data about something actually happening out there. And I care a lot about being the kind of manager people do their best work for.

You can email me, or find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.

How I work

Build with customers. Data Streams went from pre-revenue to multi-million-dollar ARR in a year because we built it next to the people using it. Data Warehouse Monitoring went from two engineers to a paying customer in four weeks.
Stay close to the computers. I read the code, sit in the incident channel, and ship my own products on nights and weekends. Managers who drift from the work make worse calls about it.
There's always a way. A stalled storage engine rewrite became a GA launch. A Postgres fleet moved across six data centers in under four weeks. Most impossible problems are focus problems.
Execute short, aim long. Stay focused on the quarter with a clear view of the vision. Ship, learn, adjust, and repeat until it sticks.

First 90 days anywhere: meet the customers, read the code, find the money, ship something.

Work

Datadog · Senior Engineering Manager, Transactional Storage 2025–present

I run the org that owns Datadog's application data storage: Postgres, UnifiedKV (the in-house key-value database), search, replication, and caching. Recent work: cut seven figures a year of infrastructure cost in a single quarter, reset a stalled rewrite of the KV storage engine and shipped it to GA (2× load absorbed in under 10 minutes, 30% lower cost), and retired two legacy database platforms.
Datadog · Senior Engineering Manager, APM Data Observability 2023–2025

Led the 14-engineer group behind the APM Data Observability suite. Incubated two new products for the data-engineer persona: scaled Data Streams Monitoring from pre-revenue to multi-million-dollar ARR in 12 months, and took Data Jobs Monitoring from private beta to GA with double-digit month-over-month revenue growth. Doubled the team in a year across 180+ interviews.
Numina · Head of Engineering 2022–2023

Owned engineering, product, and R&D for edge-AI computer-vision sensors, the data platform and public API behind them, and the custom hardware itself. Improved data accuracy 20–50% through model retraining and algorithm work, cut shipping time from months to under a week, and redesigned the data pipeline to absorb 3× ingestion growth.
Squarespace · Engineering Manager → Senior SRE / Team Lead, Infrastructure 2017–2022

Led five infrastructure teams across compute, traffic, storage, data center, and security. Architected a performance rewrite of the core edge load balancer (5× faster secure connections), migrated 3,000 VMs to bare-metal Kubernetes (deploys 1.5h to 5min), and drove a 3× gain in data-center efficiency. Primary Incident Commander and Code Camp instructor.
Earlier · Wink and Quirky 2014–2017

Site reliability at Wink, where I migrated 18 applications from Heroku to Kubernetes on AWS in three months. Before that, prototyping at Quirky on the CEO's four-person BlackOps design team: I built the prototypes for Quirky Aros and Wink Relay and led Asia vendors through final R&D for new smart-home products.

The full history with dates and detail is in the résumé (PDF).

Projects

Built by Experiment is my nights-and-weekends lab for staying sharp on 0-to-1. Everything here is designed, built, and run solo.

txt.wedding · SMS announcements for couples, live with active users.
Green Thumb · weather-smart yard and plant care reminders for homeowners.
Caring Loop · care coordination for family caregivers.
Kinoko · peer-to-peer video chat for the aging population. WebRTC, Go, TypeScript, Postgres, and a Raspberry Pi TV kiosk.

Contact

Talk to me about senior engineering leadership, advisory work, and board seats.