About me

Hi, I’m John Tobin.

Since July 2010 I’ve been working in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Google. Currently I’m the manager of Bigtable SRE in Dublin; previously I was an SRE running Bigtable, Colossus, and GFS.

I’m a double graduate of Trinity College, Dublin: I completed a B.A. (Mod) in Computer Science in 2002, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science in 2009; my M.Sc. thesis and papers are available from my publications page. I studied for my M.Sc. in evenings and weekends, in addition to my full-time job, and completed it in two years, the minimum time period permitted.

For seven years I was a Unix Systems Administrator in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin.

For four years I was a Unix Systems Administrator for the Internet Society, Trinity College Dublin.