George Bashi

About George Bashi

I’m a VP of Engineering who lives in the infrastructure / platform / SRE world: big AWS footprints, high traffic, and lots of teams depending on things quietly working. I like taking scary, fragile systems and turning them into boring, reliable platforms that everyone else can move fast on. Day to day, I lead a large infra+platform org, keep cloud spend on a deliberate trajectory, and obsess over reliability, developer experience, and incident response that feels calm and practiced instead of chaotic. I’m highly adaptable, tend to run toward fires, learn fast, and stay deep enough in the stack to argue implementation details with principal engineers and enjoy it. Outside work, I disappear into building extreme high-speed 3D printers and vibecoding whatever tools I wish existed. If you’re into infrastructure, platforms, weird side projects, or all of the above, say hi and tell me what you’re currently over-optimizing.

Experience

1. Vice President of Engineering, Infrastructure

   Yelp

   Jan 2021 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   As VP Engineering for Infrastructure & Platform, I lead a 200+ person business unit spanning core infrastructure, SRE, data platform, and corporate engineering, owning long-term technical strategy, budgets, and execution on reliability, efficiency, and developer experience.Over this period I’ve managed Engineering\'s largest line item – our AWS cloud spend – and driven roughly one-third reduction in run-rate costs through AWS-native architecture, autoscaling, aggressive tech-debt retirement, and a major renegotiation that turned an initially unfavorable renewal proposal into a materially better multi-year deal. I’ve also transformed loosely connected “infrastructure” groups into a productized internal platform org (including reskilling corp infra/telephony/helpdesk into SRE/SWE), introduced structured incident management and automation that made incidents faster and less error-prone, grew many of our principal engineers, and built the engineering-wide planning and reporting process and lightweight SOX/PCI/GDPR/CCPA controls that tie infrastructure investments and risk work directly to company-level outcomes.

Education

• University of Sussex

  Bachelor's Degree, Music Informatics

  2005 — 2008

• University of Sussex

  Master's Degree, Creative Systems

  2008 — 2009

Skills

• C
• Docker
• Postgresql
• Xslt
• Git
• Xml
• Bash
• Elasticsearch
• Aws
• Java
• Ruby
• Cassandra
• Go
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Zsh
• Python
• Ansible
• Redis
• Lua
• Linux System Administration
• Linux
• Lxc
• Puppet