Reliability · Program Management · Leadership

Allen John

Senior Technical Program Manager at Confluent, specializing in AI-driven engineering productivity and reliability at scale. UC Davis EE. Georgia Tech CS. CrossFit & Olympic weightlifting coach.

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The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.
— Kobe Bryant

About

Building reliability
at scale.

I'm a Senior Technical Program Manager at Confluent specializing in AI-driven engineering productivity and reliability. Over a decade of experience leading large-scale, cross-functional programs in cloud infrastructure, site reliability engineering, and operational excellence.

I drive adoption of AI tooling and automation to accelerate developer workflows, enhance incident and change management, and improve system resilience. My work spans Rootly, PagerDuty, Datadog, StatusPage, and Jira — used daily by 600+ engineers at Confluent.

My career path runs through RF engineering, cloud security, SRE, and program management — from AT&T and Ericsson network infrastructure, through Netskope cloud security, to leading reliability programs at Zoom, LinkedIn, and Confluent.

Outside work, I've spent nearly a decade coaching CrossFit and Olympic weightlifting. The discipline carries over — methodical preparation, relentless iteration, and showing up every day.

Allen John
12+
Years in Tech
~10
Years Coaching
80%
Sev Reduction (QoQ)
600+
Engineers Supported
Allen hiking with his dog

Experience

Career path.

From RF engineering and cloud security to reliability program management — a progression driven by impact at scale.

November 2023 — Present
Senior Technical Program Manager
Confluent · Mountain View, CA

TPM for Cloud Architecture and Reliability/Supportability, leading SRE, incident & change management initiatives across all of engineering. Launched Confluent's first end-to-end change management program with Jira, GitOps, Rootly, and Slack — used by 600+ engineers daily, reducing self-inflicted high-severity incidents by 80%+ QoQ. Led FedRAMP operational readiness and the 20x Pilot for sponsor-less moderate authorization. Own the Incident Commander program for Sev-1s, driving 30% MTTM reduction YoY. Deployed SLA automations achieving 160% YoY closure of post-incident corrective actions. Migrated all of engineering to the Rootly AI platform.

Rootly PagerDuty FedRAMP Change Management Datadog DORA Metrics Looker / BigQuery
April 2023 — November 2023
Lead Technical Program Manager
Notable Health · San Mateo, CA

First TPM hire for the company. Owned end-to-end engineering quality, reliability, and execution of high-impact programs within healthcare software integrations and ML platforms. Established the first on-call and incident management program across engineering, instrumenting PagerDuty and GCP observability for rapid detection and resolution of production outages.

Healthcare ML Incident Management PagerDuty GCP Observability
February 2022 — February 2023
Senior Technical Program Manager — SRE
Zoom · San Jose, CA

TPM for SRE, Network, and FedRAMP infrastructure teams. Led a team of 12 engineers building an end-to-end observability/monitoring application for Zoom app performance. Improved data center and public cloud onboarding automation as Zoom expanded its global footprint. Established post-mortem and DR processes, and drove FedRAMP data governance and security vulnerability patching across managed servers within strict SLAs.

SRE Observability FedRAMP Terraform Jenkins GitLab
December 2019 — February 2022
Technical Services Program Manager
LinkedIn · San Francisco, CA

Product TSM for the LinkedIn Learning video player. Drove product execution and quality across multiple product categories, reducing bug creation for enterprise learning by 35%. Managed engineering on-call teams, sprint planning, and Jira Kanban dashboards. Program managed launches including the LinkedIn Learning mobile app redesign, LXP, and video player backend re-architecture. Built Python automation for Jira reporting and production data quality fixes.

Product Quality Agile/Kanban Python On-Call Management Mobile Launch
October 2018 — November 2019
Cloud Security Engineer
Netskope · Santa Clara, CA

Integrated Netskope's CASB/SWG security product for Fortune 100 customers. Advanced expertise in cloud access security broker design, cloud workload protection across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and secure web gateway technology. Part of the initial go-live of Netskope's FedRAMP Moderate offering. Built proactive dashboards on Sumo Logic, Nagios, Splunk, and Domo.

CASB Cloud Security FedRAMP AWS/Azure/GCP Splunk
March 2018 — October 2018
Senior RAN Design & Analytics Engineer
AT&T · San Ramon, CA

Optimized AT&T's wireless network (UMTS/4G LTE/5G) for the San Francisco Bay Area — analyzing capacity, coverage, and signal propagation. Built Tableau dashboards and Python scripts for executive KPI reporting and weekly automation of network performance deltas.

RF Optimization 4G/5G Tableau Python
June 2016 — March 2018
Senior Specialist Equipment Design Engineer
AT&T · San Ramon, CA

Executed implementation, engineering, and budgets of L2/L3 and SDN/NFV network equipment from Fujitsu, Alcatel, Juniper, Adtran, Ciena, and Cisco for AT&T networking and cloud premise offices.

Network Engineering SDN/NFV Cisco/Juniper
June 2014 — June 2016
RF Engineer II
Ericsson · Pleasanton, CA

Radio frequency engineering for wireless network infrastructure — where the career in technology began.

RF Engineering Wireless Networks
Education & Certifications
UC Davis · Georgia Tech · Udacity
B.S. Electrical Engineering · OMSCS Coursework · Data Science

B.S. Electrical Engineering from UC Davis (2010–2014), IEEE Student Branch President. Georgia Tech Online Masters in Computer Science coursework including Information Security (2019–2022). Udacity Data Science Nanodegree (TensorFlow, Spark, Elasticsearch). PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP). Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO).

UC Davis — BSEE Georgia Tech — OMSCS PMI-ACP CSPO Data Science

Expertise

What I bring to the table.

Deep operational experience bridging engineering teams, tooling, and program execution.

⚠️

Incident & Change Management

End-to-end incident lifecycle — detection, response, escalation, postmortem. Built change management programs reducing self-inflicted Sev incidents by 80%+. Rootly AI platform migration, IC program ownership, DORA/MTTR metrics.

🤖

AI & Engineering Productivity

Driving adoption of AI tooling and automation (Claude Code, Cursor, Rootly AI) to accelerate developer workflows, reduce toil, and deliver measurable business outcomes across engineering organizations.

☁️

Multi-Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS, Azure, GCP operations — vendor management, TAM relationships, FedRAMP authorization, data center onboarding automation. Background in SDN/NFV network engineering and RF optimization.

📈

Program Management

Cross-functional program execution across engineering, product, sales, and support. Agile/Kanban, sprint planning, Jira/Asana workflow design, Looker/BigQuery dashboards, stakeholder communications. PMI-ACP & CSPO certified.

🔒

Security & Compliance

FedRAMP Moderate authorization (including 20x Pilot), cloud security (CASB/SWG/CWP), vulnerability management within strict SLAs, data governance. Netskope + Georgia Tech InfoSec background.

🛠️

Technical Tooling & Automation

Python, Bash, Git, SQL, APIs, Docker, Kafka. PagerDuty, Rootly, Datadog, Grafana, Splunk/SignalFX, Sumo Logic, Kibana. Google Apps Script, Workato, Terraform, Jenkins. Built automation reducing manual toil across orgs.

Philosophy

Mamba Mentality.

The mindset that connects the weight room to the war room. Relentless focus. Obsessive preparation. Constant evolution.

Relentless Preparation

Whether it's an incident runbook or a training cycle — the work happens before the moment arrives.

Detail Obsession

Every missed alert, every missed rep is a signal. Study the failures, refine the process, come back sharper.

Fearless Execution

Step into the Sev-1 channel. Step under the barbell. Confidence comes from preparation, not comfort.

Elevate Others

The best leaders make everyone around them better — on the platform, on the team, in the incident channel.

Beyond Work

Iron sharpens iron.

Nearly a decade of coaching athletes — building strength, discipline, and resilience beyond the screen.

Allen coaching an athlete on the barbell

CrossFit Coach

~10 Years

Programming and coaching CrossFit classes — from fundamentals to competitive athletes. Building training programs that develop well-rounded fitness across all domains.

  • Class programming & athlete development
  • Movement assessment & correction
  • Competition preparation
  • Community building & culture

Olympic Weightlifting Coach

~10 Years

Coaching the snatch and clean & jerk — two of the most technical movements in sport. Precision, patience, and progressive overload applied to barbell mastery.

  • Snatch & clean & jerk technique
  • Strength cycle programming
  • Mobility & position work
  • Meet preparation & peaking
Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is all an opportunity for me to rise.
— Kobe Bryant

Work with Me

Level up your career.

I offer 1:1 sessions for TPM consulting, interview preparation, and career coaching. Book a session via Topmate.

💼

TPM Consulting

Strategic guidance on incident management, change management, reliability programs, and cross-functional program execution. Drawn from experience at Confluent, Zoom, LinkedIn, and more.

🎯

Interview Prep

Mock interviews and targeted coaching for Technical Program Manager roles. Cover behavioral, technical, and program design questions with real-world scenarios and direct feedback.

🚀

Career Coaching

Navigate career transitions, promotion strategy, and skill development. Whether you're breaking into TPM, moving to senior roles, or pivoting from engineering — let's build a plan.

Book a Session

Connect

Let's connect.

Whether it's reliability engineering, program management, coaching, or just talking Lakers basketball — I'm always up for a good conversation.