Dustin Smith

Director of SRE | Data Engineering

10 years. 5 countries. $3M+ in cloud savings. I build teams and systems that scale.

View My Background

Metrics

10+ Years Experience

5 Countries

$3M+ Cloud Savings

∞ Error Budget

About

I’m Dustin—an engineer who’s spent the last decade building data platforms, ML systems, and SRE practices across five countries. I love the challenge of taking something broken or non-existent and turning it into a well-oiled machine. Currently leading SRE at Techcombank, where I’m building reliability from the ground up.

Key Wins

Here's what I've shipped that I'm most proud of—the projects where I rolled up my sleeves, led teams, and delivered measurable impact.

$1M+ AWS savings through data lifecycle optimization, right-sizing compute, and refactoring inefficient pipelines
Established SRE from zero—implemented SLO tracking, error budgets, and incident management processes
Built observability across 3,700+ data pipelines with monitoring dashboards and alerting
Owned change reviews for production deployments, reducing incidents from bad releases

Grew account 4x—built customer confidence and expanded spend from $200K to $800K annually
Landed $1M expansion by bringing Databricks to a second team at another customer
Hands-on code optimization helping customers squeeze more performance out of their Spark workloads

Built the MLOps team and established practices for model lifecycle management
Integrated ML Metadata (MLMD) with Vertex AI for tracking training and serving data
Drift detection pipeline to monitor model performance degradation in production

2.31 PB data optimization on-premise, saving $2M in hardware costs
Led cloud migration evaluation and execution from on-prem to GCP + Databricks
Established data engineering standards that scaled across multiple teams

Latest Writing

Dec 23, 2025