My bet at Redis was on Rust, in a product built mostly on C and Python, as part of an effort to modernize the codebase and make it more robust and performant. I rewrote a core component of the cluster software in Rust, and it was genuinely hard: Rust's async support was still half-built then, so I was on the nightly build, chasing libraries that shifted under me, on a component that couldn't fail. It held up, and that working precedent mattered: when the company later set out to rebuild its cluster manager from scratch, I wasn't on that team, but I was the one they asked which language to use, and I made the case for Rust over the alternatives and helped them get started. I'd also helped rewrite RedisJSON, Redis's JSON data type, from C into Rust from its first commit, years before AI made rewrites like that cheap.

I took over Redis's proxy team in April 2020, during the COVID lockdowns. It's the module tens of thousands of client connections pass through, the most performance-critical part of Redis. I inherited a team that had gone quiet: people did their job and said little else, with no real sense of team. I had to build trust as a brand-new manager, entirely over video calls. I rebuilt the culture from the ground up, and got the team measuring itself by what we delivered together. I also found us spending nearly all our time reactively fixing bugs, and pushed the team toward fixing the recurring problem areas instead, against real pressure from above to keep the bug count moving. The code got measurably more stable, and the work got more interesting. Later I led a second team, spanning Israel and Bulgaria, automating Redis's cloud operations across Kubernetes, AWS, and GCP.