Maya Okonkwo

Systems engineer building tools for small teams

πŸ“ Lisbon, Portugal

I build the unglamorous machinery that lets small teams ship like large ones β€” the deploy pipeline nobody thinks about, the migration that runs at 3am without waking anyone, the log line that turns a two-day outage into a ten-minute fix. Most of my career has been spent on the wrong side of that trade: at big companies, with big platform teams, solving problems a team of six will never have. Now I work with the teams of six. The constraints are sharper and the work matters more. I write about the parts of engineering that don't make conference talks. Mostly in Go and TypeScript. Usually with a dog asleep under the desk.

Team reviewing an architecture sketch on a whiteboard
A laptop open to a code editor at a cluttered desk
Morning light across an empty coworking space
Two engineers pairing at a single screen
Notebook and coffee beside a keyboard

Small teams should not run Kubernetes

Not because it is bad β€” because it is a full-time job you have not hired for. What six engineers actually get from it, what it actually costs them, and the three cases where I still say yes.

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Work

  1. F
    Company
    Fieldnote
    Role
    Staff Engineer, Platform
    Years
    2023 β€” Present
  2. H
    Company
    Harbor Systems
    Role
    Senior Engineer, Infrastructure
    Years
    2020 β€” 2023
  3. O
    Company
    Ostrich Labs
    Role
    Software Engineer
    Years
    2017 β€” 2020
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