About

I'm Joel Martinez. I'm a principal engineer at Reddit leading performance strategy, and I spent the twelve years before that doing the same kind of work at Google Drive and YouTube. This site is where I write down what I've learned about performance engineering at scale.

At Google I founded and led the web performance team for Drive. From there I moved to YouTube, where I ran performance, reliability, and A/B testing for YouTube Living Room, the team responsible for YouTube on TVs. Most TVs run old browser engines on slow chips with very little memory. At Reddit I'm laying the philosophy and groundwork for the company's performance strategy.

Three very different products with entirely different tech stacks. Every performance org at scale runs into some combination of the same failures: metrics nobody trusts, performance work that does not get funded because no one can point at the revenue number, tooling that tells you a regression has happened but cannot tell you where, culture that only cares about performance the week after an incident. The 8-Layer Performance Engineering Operating System is my attempt to write down the shape of that pattern and what it takes to break it.

If you want the full framework, start with The 8-Layer Performance Engineering Operating System. If you want the deeper dives, the writing page has everything I've published.

Full work history on LinkedIn.