spevack.org
max.spevack@gmail.com | LinkedIn
July 2025 - Present
The easiest way to describe my job is as CIQ’s Linux fixer and as consigliere to the CTO.
Jul 2021 - Jul 2023
I formed and led the ~50 person GCE Fleet organization, owning the development, qualification, and release velocity of the kernel + hypervisor bundle running on all GCE hosts. The team owned the lifecycle and versioning of GCE host pools.
Jul 2019 - Jun 2021
Jul 2019 - Jun 2021
I led the >100 person organization that owned Amazon Linux – available as a public EC2 image and as an internal server OS for both AWS and Amazon’s retail business – as well as Amazon’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO).
I was ultimately accountable for Amazon’s Linux portfolio – product and engineering, including:
With the OSPO, I re-organized the team to take a tooling-based approach to its charter, with a specifically increasing the number of cases (including GitHub administration and M&A work) that could be resolved either automatically or by customers directly and creating tooling to reduce the team’s manual labor.
Feb 2016 - Jun 2019
I led the three GCE engineering teams accountable for:
Customer-facing launches include Skylake and Cascade Lake CPUs, SAP-certified large memory instances (ultramem, m2), Nvidia GPUs (V100, P4 with GRID support, T4), and nested virtualization. The team received four of Google’s “Cloud Feat of Engineering” awards for response to Spectre / Meltdown, response to L1TF, nested virtualization, and the SAP-certified large-memory instances.
Aug 2011 - Jan 2016
I led the team accountable for Amazon Linux. The team’s primary objective was to build, qualify, deploy, and support multiple versions of Amazon Linux. This included feature development and integration with EC2, building kernel and userspace packages, security updates, and deploying packages and images. The team owned the infrastructure and tooling to build packages, compose images, stage repositories, perform automated testing, and gather metrics.
I spent a year simultaneously managing two distinct teams – the Amazon Linux team discussed above, and the team responsible for qualifications of new EC2 instance types and platforms. During that time, the qualifications team developed tooling, test coverage, and reporting for the T2, C4, and D2 launches. I assisted with the hiring of a manager to transition the qualifications team over to, and I helped with onboarding, training, and a smooth handoff of responsibilities. I also spent 18 months as part of the EC2 Operations team. I was responsible for a weekly summary of all EC2 operational issues including discussion of customer impacting events, status of key metrics, and overall EC2 fleet health.
Feb 2008 - Aug 2011
Feb 2006 - Feb 2008
Aug 2004 - Feb 2006
I was ultimately accountable for the Fedora Project, a collaboration between Red Hat and a worldwide community of free software contributors whose flagship project is the Fedora Linux distribution. I was responsible for Red Hat employees and community contributors in numerous areas: product and engineering, operations, marketing, branding, community, communications, public speaking (LWN, Slashdot, Ohio Linux Fest), legal, financial, budgeting, and hiring.
After two years I split the role into several parts – a continued Fedora Project Leader, a new Fedora Engineering Manager, and a new Open Source Community Architecture team, which I led. This was a global team, with a charter to deliver highly leveraged growth, development, and success of communities strategic to Red Hat’s business and brand, including:
Oct 2002 - Aug 2004
Sep 1998 - Jun 2002