cover_letter / art_lmgAk-w5Ga0

Dear Fastly Hiring Team, Fastly sits at a rare intersection: infrastructure that is simultaneously invisible to end-users and absolutely critical to the digital experiences they rely on daily. The Metacognition Team's mission — turning raw platform signals into clear, trustworthy, actionable intelligence — is precisely the kind of product challenge I find most meaningful, because it determines whether customers can actually *use* the power of a platform or merely pay for it. My work scaling Intuit's ICE platform to 675M+ engagements while driving developer adoption through self-service tooling taught me that the gap between a capable platform and a trusted one is almost always an observability and insight problem. ## Technical and Product Foundation My technical credibility in the signal-to-insight domain runs deep. At Intuit, I owned telemetry and usage data pipelines (SQL, BigQuery) across ~20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs, using that data to prioritize developer pain points and build Asterias — a declarative asset lifecycle management platform with a GraphQL API. I drove a 275% YoY growth in ICE engagements, scaling throughput from 6K to 50K TPS via an rSocket migration that supported approximately 1.5M concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99. That work required translating raw infrastructure metrics into executive-level narratives for the CTO while simultaneously ensuring the developer-facing experience remained intuitive and actionable — exactly the dual audience the Metacognition role demands. At Splunk, I owned the Search Service (Go microservices), Search Catalog (PostgreSQL metadata service), and Splunk Processing Language (SPL/SPL2) — products that are fundamentally about making logs, metrics, and events navigable for both technical operators and business stakeholders. I led a query performance optimization initiative that achieved up to 10x performance improvements in Splunk Cloud Services search for a beta enterprise customer, and delivered the Scheduler Service end-to-end in approximately four months. Working in the observability and log analytics space gave me direct experience with the challenge Fastly's Metacognition Team is solving: how do you make complex, high-volume event streams legible and actionable at scale? On the AI and evaluation side, I built aeval — a local-first model evaluation platform with a FastAPI orchestrator, TimescaleDB for time-series metric storage, a Redis job queue, and a Next.js dashboard. The platform implements statistical rigor (bootstrap confidence intervals, Welch's t-test, Cohen's d effect size) and automated safety gates — essentially a reporting and intelligence layer for AI model behavior. This mirrors the Metacognition mandate: define what signals matter, ensure they are trustworthy, and surface them in ways that drive decisions. ## Why This Role The Metacognition Staff PM role is a direct extension of the product work I find most compelling: building the intelligence layer that makes a complex platform legible. Fastly's edge cloud platform generates a continuous stream of performance, reliability, security, and cost signals across some of the world's most demanding customer workloads. The challenge of unifying those signals into coherent dashboards, alerts, and executive summaries — while serving both a developer debugging a cache miss and a CISO reviewing threat patterns — is a genuinely hard product problem, and one I am well-positioned to lead. I am particularly drawn to the security intelligence dimension of this role. At Kaiser Permanente, I led the enterprise rollout of Splunk Logging-as-a-Service handling 1.7 TB of daily log volume across 200+ internal enterprise customers, and built ITSI Application Monitoring-as-a-Service — both products that required translating security and operational signals into actionable monitoring experiences for non-technical stakeholders. The Metacognition Team's responsibility for attack visibility and security insights maps directly to that experience. ## Selected Relevant Experience - **Splunk Search & Observability Ownership:** Owned Search Service (Go microservices), Search Catalog (PostgreSQL), and SPL/SPL2 roadmap for Splunk Cloud Services; delivered Scheduler Service end-to-end in ~4 months and achieved up to 10x query performance improvements for enterprise beta customers. - **Platform Intelligence at Scale:** Worked closely with telemetry and usage data (SQL, BigQuery) across ~20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs at Intuit to prioritize developer pain points; scaled ICE to 675M+ engagements in FY23 with sub-25ms TP99 at 50K TPS. - **Developer Self-Service Platform:** Delivered ICE Self-Service (DevPortal, GitOps config, ICE Playground), reducing developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes in pre-prod and under 24 hours for production, while mitigating $1M+ in projected opex growth. - **Enterprise Log Analytics:** Led enterprise rollout of Splunk Logging-as-a-Service (1.7 TB daily volume, 200+ internal customers) and ITSI Application Monitoring-as-a-Service at Kaiser Permanente. - **Evaluation and Reporting Infrastructure:** Built aeval evaluation platform with FastAPI, TimescaleDB, Redis, and Next.js — implementing statistical rigor (bootstrap CIs, Welch's t-test, Cohen's d) and CI/CD regression detection as a reporting and intelligence layer for AI model behavior. - **Cross-Functional Roadmap Leadership:** Designed RICE-based prioritization frameworks for 3 microservice backlogs at Splunk, balancing Fortune 500 customer requirements, internal partner needs, and third-party developer priorities across competing domains. - **Executive Communication:** Conducted enterprise-wide Service Language Assessment across 9 languages at Intuit, synthesizing usage data and developer feedback into strategic recommendations presented directly to the CTO. ## Closing Fastly's mission — building a more trustworthy Internet — resonates with me because trust is ultimately an information problem. Customers trust a platform when they can see what it is doing, understand why, and act on that understanding with confidence. The Metacognition Team is building the layer that makes that trust possible, and I would bring 12+ years of platform product leadership, deep observability and log analytics experience, and a track record of translating complex system behavior into clear, actionable experiences to help lead that work. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background aligns with Fastly's needs. Sincerely, **O. Felix Amoruwa** famoruwa@berkeley.edu | 909-731-9011 | felixamoruwa.info