Friday April 4th 2025 was my last day at Equinix. Monday April 7th I started a new job at a startup called Tigris Data.

I wish I could look back fondly at my time at Equinix but largely the job was a failure. I disliked working there so much I left after only 11 months on the job and abandoned my RSU’s that were going to vest in September.

I had some concerns when I joined Equinix my interview with Gary was concerning. He told me the place was a mess. I still joined because I was so burned out at Shopify and the total compensation they offered me exceeded what I was making at Shopify.

I do feel bad leaving Equinix early. Ryan Senior who has been a friend of mine for over 20 years got me the job. I felt like I betrayed him leaving so soon. But the job just wasn’t a fit and and wanted something more. Ryan was hugely gracious when I told him I was leaving. I did leave for something I was more excited about and he understood which I really appreciated.

My first six months at Equinix was really bumpy. I joined the Equinix Metal product and was brought in to improve the reliability of their PostgreSQL deployment. The PostgreSQL environment was completely neglected and the DBA in charge didn’t really seem to care that much. The team I joined did basically no real work. I think most of them worked less then 20 hours a week. No one seemed actually interested in improving the equinix metal application. They just seemed to be focused on their own pet project ideas. Mostly which revolved around hopeless rewrites of the application.

After just six months on the job around October I learned that Equinix was giving up on the Equinix Metal product and it would be shutdown. I can’t say I was surprised as it was clearly an unhealthy team.

The whole organization was a mess. I think I should have realized how messed up it was going to be when they didn’t have a laptop or anything ready for me when I joined. Operationally the place was setup like a early 2000’s IT shop with all access being extremely limited. I couldn’t even make pull requests to certain git repos or view many of them. I felt the the place was actively conspiring against me working.

After the cancelld the metal product I spent two months finishing up PostgreSQL upgrade and migration to an automated failover system (Patroni). After I wrapped this up in January I joined a team that had been working on a metrics/observability thing and a Identity and Access Management application. This wasn’t a great fit. The IAM team had spent a lot of time creating a lot of IAM concepts then baking this into a demo application that consisted of five services. Security Token Service, Governance, Registry, Access and a policily resolution side car. They were kind of a rebuiling the OPA framework bit by bit with a bit of a layering of Oauth and IAM mixed in. It was all very political and overlapped with like three other teams with various broken systems actually in production.

The team wasn’t much of a fit for me because I wasn’t interested in the problem domain much. I had no interest is fighting a bunch of pointless political battles inside Equinix about what the application runtime should be. Finally the whole thing was written in Clojure which I found hugely obtuse. The personalities on the team were ok. I just felt they had been in their Clojure bubble too long and probably needed to move on to something more practical.

Anyway by happenstance Ovais Tariq had reached out to on LinkedIn me about joining Tigris Data and I couldn’t pass it up despite leaving behind a lot of sure income at Equinix for a bunch of dubious equity at Tigris. I agonized the decision to join Tigris a lot. Leaving Equinix after just eleven months felt like a failure and I was taking a big risk and a pay cut to join a very uncertain startup. But after considering things for a while I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to join a small startup. I was going to be just the 18th employee and that seemed pretty cool. My background doesn’t tend to match up well with startups because most of them need full stack product developers, not a infra focused person like me. So I took a mild leap and decided to leave Equinix and try my hand at Tigris.