James Chacon is a Principal Engineer at Snowflake. He is an industry veteran with 30+ years of experience in developing and the deployment of large scale distributed systems. He focuses at Snowflake on distributed systems management at scale and developing software and processes for keeping Snowflake’s reliability high. Prior to joining Snowflake he was an SRE at Google for over 11 years, focusing on many different areas over time including Hangouts, Chrome and BigQuery. He took on many different leadership roles both as an IC and manager leading large teams focused on critical Google products as well as leading large scale incident response. He was an early proponent of Go development within SRE and led many efforts to make it accessible for new engineers including teaching classes, code reviews, etc. Prior to joining Google he worked at a variety of companies including EMC, BBN Planet and contributed for many years to the NetBSD open source project as a developer and release engineer.
