Andrew Tahvildary joined Cloudscaling last month as Vice President of Engineering. He joins us most recently from newScale, where he led the engineering team for more than six years as the company effected a successful exit via acquisition by Cisco. He was a member of the executive leadership team, responsible for product development and architecture, quality assurance, support, release management, program management and lifecycle budgeting for the engineering organization.
Before newScale, Andrew was engineering VP for Primavera Systems, prior to its acquisition by Oracle. In total, his engineering leadership experience stretches back nearly 20 years, covering a range of technical roles.
I spent a few minutes with Andrew discussing his experience and his philosophy of leading high-performing engineering organizations.
RC: Let’s start with your experiences at newScale, Primavera and Evolve. What did those technical leadership roles teach you about building engineering teams at high-growth startups?
AT: The key thing to any engineering team – startups or non-startups – is the people. If you don’t have the right people with the right level of skills, the right attitude and the right desire, you’re not going to be successful.
