John Allspaw is Etsy’s chief technology officer (CTO), leading the Product Engineering, Infrastructure, and Operations teams. Previously, he was the SVP of Infrastructure and Operations at Etsy. For over 17 years, he has worked in system operations in the biotech, government, and online media industries.

John began his career running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government. In 1997, he made the leap to the web, building the technical infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster and Flickr. John is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time, both published by O’Reilly Media. He holds a BS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MSC from Lund University.