About

I'm Victor Em — Engineering Manager for Data Infrastructure at a real-time crypto trading startup in Mountain View, CA. I manage a team of seven engineers and stay hands-on with system design, code reviews, and production incident response.

Background

I studied at Stanford (B.S. + M.S., GPA 3.66/3.78) and have spent the last decade at the intersection of data engineering and platform infrastructure.

2025 – Now Engineering Manager, Data Infrastructure — Stealth Crypto Startup
2023 – 2025 Staff Engineer, ML & Data Platform — SiriusXM
2022 – 2023 Senior Data Engineer — Meta
2019 – 2022 Data Engineering Lead — Disney Streaming Services
2016 – 2019 Senior Data Analyst / Data Scientist — Foursquare

My technical depth is in real-time data infrastructure: ClickHouse, a pub/sub message bus, DBT, Postgres CDC pipelines, dimensional modeling. I've also done significant work in ML platform infrastructure (Databricks, AWS, IaC) and privacy/compliance data systems at Meta.

What I'm Working On Now

Right now I'm heads-down building real-time data infrastructure for a crypto trading platform — ClickHouse + a pub/sub bus + Postgres CDC processing 400+ trades per second, with materialized aggregations serving a live web terminal and Telegram trading app. The interesting problems are at the intersection of streaming latency, Solana's account model, and keeping a team of seven moving fast without accumulating debt.

I also automate as much of my own workflow as possible: session logging, PR review pipelines, team status reporting via Claude Code and GitHub Actions. Meta-tooling is something I think about a lot.

This Site

This is a Technical Workshop — a living archive of engineering work, system designs, and weekly learnings. It's public partly for accountability, partly because I find other engineers' logs useful and want to contribute to that.

  • Logs: Weekly digests of what I shipped and what I learned.
  • Essays: Long-form posts on systems, management, and technical decisions.
  • Resources: Frameworks and guides I've built up over the years.

Outside Work

I'm President of the Board of Trustees at the Lambda Phi Epsilon Foundation, a 501(c)3 providing need-based and merit-based scholarships to students across 60+ universities. We've raised $200K+ in alumni donations since launch. I also built the donation pipeline (PayPal/Stripe → Salesforce → QuickBooks via Zapier).

I play Magic: The Gathering at a competitive level (cEDH format) and occasionally build analytics tooling for tournament data.

Professional Contact

For my resume, official bio, or professional inquiries:

victorem.me →
Read the Logs Read Essays