// engineering executive · inventor · author · speaker

Andrew Swerdlow

I build the platforms, safety systems, and engineering cultures behind products people rely on, from scrappy teams shipping fast to companies serving billions.

andrew · session · ~/about

whoami

VP Engineering @ Roblox, Engineering Acceleration & Core Platforms.

Previously: Director @ Instagram (Trust & Safety) · earlier, Google.

cat focus.txt

"New code is cheap now. Judgment isn't."

I build the platforms, safety systems, and teams that supply both:

infrastructure people stand on, and organizations people grow in.

39US patents · 1,200+ citations
180engineers led in a single org
3platforms · Google, Instagram, Roblox
Billionsof users served and protected
9publications & conference talks
#1Amazon bestseller · Tech Leadership
cat about.md

I work on the systems that sit beneath the products people depend on: developer infrastructure, service platforms, privacy and safety mechanisms, language systems, and, more recently, the agentic systems that are changing how software itself gets built.

The common thread is not scale for its own sake. The work I keep returning to is the design of systems that help people make better decisions: what to automate, what to measure, what to keep human, and how to preserve trust as software becomes easier to generate and harder to reason about.

And because engineering organizations are made of people, not services, half of this work has always been human. The platforms I am proudest of made thousands of engineers a little braver: safe to ship fast, safe to say "I don't know," safe to do careful work under pressure.

Most of what I have learned about that human half went into Tech Leadership, a field guide for engineers growing into leaders. I wrote it as the book I wished someone had handed me; I have been glad to watch it find its readers.

Andrew Swerdlow
swerdlow.jpg · San Francisco, CA
ls work/

The connective tissue of fast-moving engineering teams.

Four threads run through Roblox, Instagram, and Google: different products, same underlying job, make it safe to move fast, whether that's a scrappy team or a very large org.

01 · platforms

Infrastructure product teams stand on.

The core API and service stack behind roblox.com; developer infrastructure for Google Assistant, YouTube, and Android; compute platforms for ML inference and training. Platforms earn their keep when product teams stop noticing them.

02 · trust, safety & privacy

Protection as an engineering discipline.

Founded Google's privacy engineering program and served as its engineering voice to US and EU regulators. At Instagram, led Trust & Safety: teen safety defaults, integrity infrastructure, and AI fairness for billions of people.

03 · ai-native engineering

AI as part of how engineering works.

At Roblox, weaving AI into the everyday lifecycle (review, testing, migrations, observability) with guardrails that encode institutional judgment, so autonomy earns trust the same way engineers do: gradually, with accountability.

04 · leadership systems

Organizations are systems too.

Author of Tech Leadership, mentor to directors, engineering managers, and senior ICs. Clarity, trust, and sustainable execution treated with the same rigor as any production system.

ls -la patents/ # 39 USPTO entries

Invention as a habit, not an event.

Thirty-nine US patent filings, twenty-nine granted, cited more than 1,200 times in later patents and research, across privacy, identity, language inference, browser security, and ranking. Most originated while founding Google's privacy engineering program. Featured below: the most-cited of the granted set, drawings included, because the diagrams still ask good questions.

Patent figure showing a swimlane sequence diagram across client device, service provider, and data server for client-side personalization
Client-side user model. Personalization computed on the device, so the sensitive model never leaves it. Cited by 302 later patents and papers; the portfolio's most-referenced work. US9549047B1 · 2017
Patent figure showing a network of people and devices contributing privacy settings
Crowdsourced privacy settings. Safe privacy defaults learned from aggregate privacy-control behavior. Cited by 248 later patents and papers. US9898613B1 · 2018
Patent figure showing a hand-drawn face overlaid with a facial-recognition feature mesh
Image search privacy protection. Detecting when image search exposes a person, and protecting them before results render. Cited by 37. US9098584B1 · 2015
Patent figure showing a preferred-language inference flow
Preferred-language inference. Per-user language classifiers for serving people in the languages they actually use. Cited by 46. US8838437B1 · 2014
Patent figure showing extension analyzer modules including lexer, parser, CFG generator, path decoder, and taint tracker
Browser extension control-flow analysis. Static control-flow graphs to find sensitive data paths in third-party code; the sibling patent adds taint tracking. Cited by 41 combined. US8286250B1 · 2012 US8365291B1 · 2013
Patent figure showing a social feed interface with messages in English, French, and Chinese
Multi-language content feeds. Detecting and translating mixed-language social feeds into the languages a reader understands. Cited by 43 with its sibling. US9477659B2 · 2016
The rest of the portfolio. Cluster-based language detection, multiple personas, shared-content privacy, zombie-account detection, account backup and rollback, and more. Full index ↗ Google Scholar ↗
git log --graph --career
a3f9e21 (HEAD → main) 2023–present

Roblox · VP Engineering, Engineering Acceleration & Core Platforms

  • Own the foundational API, infrastructure, and service stack behind roblox.com, sustaining 1M+ requests per second for 140M+ daily users.
  • Drive the company-level transition to AI-native engineering: agentic code review, test generation, migrations, and AI observability across production workflows.
  • Sponsor the Stateless Jobs Platform, a Kubernetes-based runtime expanding into a unified AI compute fabric for CPU and GPU inference and training.
  • Oversee CI/CD, configuration and flagging, testing frameworks, and the observability stack for one of the industry's largest engineering teams.
7c12b48 2021–2023

Instagram (Meta) · Director of Engineering, Trust & Safety

  • Led the 180-engineer Trust & Safety organization across the Bay Area and New York, protecting billions of people.
  • Shipped landmark teen safety: default-private accounts, age-appropriate experiences, safer interactions, and mental well-being surfaces.
  • Built reusable integrity infrastructure (checkpoints, frictions, warnings, reporting) used across the app; pillar lead for AI/ML fairness.
e08d5f3 2005–2021

Google · Director of Engineering

  • Google's first privacy engineer: founded the global Privacy Engineering program and scaled it to a 100+ person organization across five sites; primary engineering contact for US and EU regulators.
  • Directed Google Assistant & Mobile Search developer infrastructure (~100 engineers, four sites); owned Firebase Test Lab, powering Play's pre-launch reports for millions of Android apps.
  • Directed open-source mobile testing strategy (Espresso, EarlGrey, Robolectric, Android Bazel) and re-architected YouTube's developer platform from monolithic Python to microservices.
  • Core contributor to Google's Unicode and internationalization program; invented Social Translate, an open-source Chrome extension for the multilingual social web.
ls talks/ writing/

Out in the world.

Talks and writing on agentic engineering, internationalization, privacy, and the craft of technical leadership.

man tech-leadership

Tech Leadership

Tech Leadership: The Blueprint for Evolving from Individual Contributor to Tech Leader, an Amazon #1 bestseller, endorsed by leaders from Google, Meta, and Roblox.

It is the book I wished someone had handed me at Google in 2008: how to grow scope without losing technical curiosity, how to build trust faster than you build process, and how to stay close enough to the work to make careful, useful decisions. I still use its frameworks weekly, mentoring directors, engineering managers, senior ICs, and founders.

If you are an engineer wondering whether leadership has to mean leaving the craft behind, it was written for you. The answer, for what it is worth, is no.

Tech Leadership book cover by Andrew Swerdlow
cat principles.md
claim 01

AI changes the cost of producing code, not the need for judgment.

claim 02

Speed without safety just creates debt faster.

claim 03

Privacy, safety, and integrity are engineering systems, not policy afterthoughts.

claim 04

Trust is the highest-leverage system an organization can build.

open mailto:

For AI strategy with founders or boards, talks, or quiet technical conversations.

The most useful conversations usually start with a real system, a real team, and a question that is still unsettled. If that sounds like yours, write to me.

[email protected]

exit # thanks for reading