About

About

Hi, I’m Jiajian Yang — you can call me JJ.

I’m an engineering leader with deep systems roots. I started close to the metal with Linux, networking, and carrier-grade infrastructure. Over time, the problems widened into platform engineering, reliability, cloud and data systems, developer infrastructure, security, and eventually the organizations responsible for operating them.

Today I’m Senior Director of Engineering at Athos Commerce. My broader scope spans a globally distributed engineering organization, platform and data modernization, customer-facing engineering, cybersecurity, internal tooling, and AI enablement.

Before Athos, I spent a decade at Cisco as an engineer and Engineering Manager working on IOS-XR forwarding infrastructure across 15+ carrier-grade hardware platforms. Earlier, I worked on Linux kernel quality engineering at Red Hat.

The common thread has stayed fairly consistent: I like difficult systems problems, especially when architecture, operations, economics, and organizational ownership interact.

What Engineering Notes is

This is where I keep the technical side visible. I write about:

  • systems I’m building and operating
  • platform and infrastructure architecture
  • reliability, observability, and things that broke
  • cloud economics and infrastructure trade-offs
  • developer tooling, CI/CD, and automation
  • data infrastructure
  • AI-assisted engineering workflows that survive contact with real work
  • engineering and organizational patterns
  • homelab experiments that I can break safely

Browse by category or tag, or see everything in the archives.

Where to go