Everything published on this site represents solely my personal opinions and engineering observations. None of these writings represent the views, positions, or strategies of my current or former employers.
System Specification & Background
My name is Memo Sandoval – short for Guillermo in Spanish. I'm a Software Engineer by day and professional bug writer by night.
I earned my bachelor's degree from the National Technological Institute of Mexico, with studies roughly equivalent to Computer Science. I later pursued graduate studies in Cybertronics at La Salle University, completing 19 courses.
Boomerang'ed to Google in 2026, as a Site Reliability Engineer, after over a year at Duolingo, being responsible for Observability. Before that, I spent seven years at Google managing debug logging systems, log-based insights, and monitoring metrics storage. Earlier roles included DevOps engineering in market research, plus experience in financial services, communications, and healthcare sectors—spanning over 15 years total.
Operational Invariants
I value the ability to evaluate trade-offs devoid of passion, and approaching problems from first-principles — lacking context and asking the necessary questions to debug production systems and organizations alike.
I do whatever the team needs me to do. While I enjoy diving into failure modes, distributed systems, efficiency CLI tools, and debugging agents, true impact often comes as coaching, roadmapping, de-escalating conflict, and active listening.
Humans are complex systems: we carry personal interests, career aspirations, family affairs, good days, and hard days. Rather than ignoring this reality, I acknowledge human behavior, articulate incentives out loud, and negotiate sustainable solutions where no one is ignored.
Deployment History
Engineering Manager (SRE) · Google Payments
Lead on the SRE team for Payments at Google, overseeing mission-critical financial infrastructure and reliability posture.
Senior Engineering Manager · Duolingo
Led the Observability team, responsible for making the monitoring, alerting, triaging, and root-causing experience just-work out of the box. Launched initiatives on standardization of instrumentation and tooling, correlation and simplification of signals for faster incident response.
Staff Software Engineer / Engineering Manager · Google Cloud Infrastructure
Led engineering teams across Technical Infrastructure products including Monarch Time Series Repository, Error Reporting, and Debug Logs. Managed distributed systems handling ingestion of TB/s of data and 500k requests per second, launched regionalization of a product from global to run across 46 regions with zero negative customer impact.
Senior Software Engineer (DevOps) · Critical Mix
DevOps engineering lead for market research platform serving 250-employee company. Designed automation framework creating 4 NLP-powered bots, launched survey programming and serving platform handling bursty traffic, and maintained project management tools supporting core business operations.
Software Engineer · Grupo Bursatil Mexicano
Unblocked launch of Trading Pro application by independently creating responsive HTML component for real-time stock market data display after Microsoft Silverlight deprecation. Productionized proof of concept including test suite and documentation for team handover.
Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer · Baktun
Contractor primarily for Authentic Response (acquired by Critical Mix) in market research field. Built CRM with 3 contractors that scaled to support business requiring 10x the engineering headcount by 2018. Contributed to projects spanning VoIP, NAT traversal, unified communications, and SIP protocols.
Beyond Code
When I'm not in code-adjacent adventures I like learning about the universe, electronics of everyday consumer products, and patterns of human behavior.
I'm a fan of most things sci-fi, enjoyer of video games as a social activity.