(last updated - 2026/08/14)
Dennis Towne
11321 South Grandville Ave #301
South Jordan, UT. 84009
Tel: 716-462-8270
email: soda@xirr.com
Work Experience
Aug 15 - Current; Google, Inc.
General
- Primary responder for the company-wide emergency response team
'Tech IRT'; responder on ~40 major incidents over six years,
including datacenter power, cooling, and hardware failures, large
network outages, and large-scale security incidents, many of them
affecting ML fleets and capacity
- Site dean for SRE EDU onboarding education; taught ~150 classes
to roughly 1500 new engineers, and as dean ran quarterly
week-long onboarding sessions end to end for the Pittsburgh
office
Site Reliability Engineer - 2021-Present - Google DeepMind / ML Serving
- Five years of backend oncall for Google's production ML serving
stack: Bard, Gemini, Veo, and nearly every other major model
launch, on a fleet of tens of thousands of model server jobs
serving thousands of models for Search, Ads, YouTube, and other
product areas
- Designed large parts of the load balancing and the entirety of
the load shedding configuration for the initial Bard LLM
launches; since then, owner of autoscaling design and
configuration for model servers and routers across the fleet
- Built load shedding, autoscaling, and load balancing as one
integrated system: shared overload signals (CPU/TPU utilization,
backlog, contention estimates) drive both shedding and scaling,
load balancing spills traffic away from unhealthy tasks without
starving the autoscaler, and default configurations cover
thousands of heterogeneous models with little per-model tuning
- Design goal: no task ever falls over, regardless of offered
load. Shedding is designed to survive ~10x overload; in one
major incident the fleet absorbed a sustained 3x overload for
several hours at 100% accelerator utilization with only slightly
elevated latency
- Deep familiarity with accelerator serving pathologies:
non-interruptible one-request-at-a-time TPU pipelines, CPU-side
request batching, keeping pipelines packed without backlogging,
and isolating high-latency from low-latency traffic
Site Reliability Engineer - 2017-2021 - Ads Trust and Safety
- Team tech lead; responsible for the SRE engagement with the
browser spam detection systems
- Owned reliability for four large log joining and log processing
pipelines that ran a battery of filters against browser traffic
logs to flag spam clicks and impressions. Each pipeline ran in
duplicate in two geographic clusters, and a separate layer built
on a large distributed Paxos cluster deduplicated and merged the
output
- Pipelines had a target processing latency of under an hour, but
could fall hours or days behind during incidents and then have
to recover quickly. Much of the work was capacity engineering
for recovery: resource planning ahead of demand, scaling work to
keep the systems moving when backlogs became unmanageable, and
a migration to SSD backing storage that bought roughly 2-3 years
of additional lifetime while the replacement was built
- Wrote the templates and configuration for the replacement
pipeline, built on more modern log joining infrastructure, that
consolidated the filter pipelines and the deduplication layer
into a single system. Once it was in place the SRE engagement
was no longer needed and was wound down
- SRE for the ads integrity system, a large handler-driven
platform that checks and ultimately approves or rejects ad text
and ad content submissions that violate the Google Ads terms of
service
Site Reliability Engineer - 2015-2017 - Google Play
- Help keep Android Play running
- SRE Service owner for Play Games
- C++ and Java backend maintenance work
- Build tooling and infrastructure for Android and ML backend services
Apr 03 - Apr 15; Vocal Technologies
Associate - electrical engineer/ lead programmer
Languages - C, various DSP assembly languages
Duties/experience:
- Linux development - ARM/MIPS/x86 device drivers, application
layer, boot scripts, debugging, etc.
- SIP protocol stack implementation
- Cryptography - create specification for patient unique identifiers
for Maryland State Health Care Commission (MHCC)
- Design and implement AES/CCM cryptography subsystem as Linux
device driver for ad-hoc mesh network packet radio
- Implement MIL STD 16/32 kbps CVSD vocoder from specification
- Develop signal processing library for medical artery elasticity
measurement device
- TI and ADI Blackfin DSP hardware bringup
- ADI, TI, ARM, Microchip, and other DSP programming
- Subband-based AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancellation) development
- G168 echo cancellation algorithm development
- Implement software encoder/decoder for (16x11)^2 turbo product code
using extended Hamming subcodes
- Data modulation maintenance and porting, V.21, V.23, V.22,
V.32, V.34, V.90 and related data protocol schemes
- Fax protocol and pump maintenance, V.27, V.29, V.17, V.33,
V.34HD, T.30, T.31, T.32, T.4, T.6, and more
- ILBC floating point to fixed point conversion
- Voice coder performance optimization
- PSTN FXO/FXS hardware design and bringup
- Narrow band FM/FSK modulation/demodulation for RF links
- RF hardware design (400 and 800 MHz range)
- ATA hardware and software development
Jan 95 - Current; Dentinmud Internet Services
Owner - privately held company
Languages - C/C++
Duties/experience:
- Design, create and maintain multi-server MMO codebase in C/C++
- Develop and maintain cross platform libraries for Win32,
MacOSX, and Linux
- Creation and maintenance of cross platform GUI client
- Responsible for web site, content additions, online servers
- Manage backups, upgrades, and security fixes on servers
- Design new additions and content
- Improve accessibility for visually impaired users
- Manage staff of ~20 volunteer builders
Jun 97 - Sep 02; IBM, eServer division
Software engineer for iSeries OS/400 operating system.
Languages - C/C++, PPC assembly, PL/MP
Duties/experience:
- Design, add, and debug core operating system routines including
interrupt handlers, process management, synchronization
primitives, and low level statistics collection
- Implementation of hardware multithreading support
- Use DEV/2000 RCS as part of a strict defect process
- Performance and systems analysis of OS/400 workloads
Apr 96 - Apr 97; Geography Department at Utah State University
Lead programmer for Mojave Georeferenced Bibliography Database.
Languages - C/C++
Duties/experience:
- Design and build a georeferenced database for research data, along
with parsers for adding new entries and an HTML interface for access
to the database. The majority of this project was written in GNU
C++, and was ported to a number of operating systems, including AIX,
ULTRIX, Linux, SunOs/Solaris, and Windows 95.
May 94 - Sep 95; Utilities Department at University of Alaska Fairbanks
Full time temporary assistant to site electrical engineer
Duties/Experience:
- Experience with Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers, wiring
and installation of Square D 'PowerLogic' networking system. Was
responsible for setup and programming of Square D circuit monitors
and maintaining/upgrading network. Extensive work on General Electric
switchgear and 10 MW steam turbine. Troubleshooting of ground faults,
static excitation system, and control/metering circuits.
Dec 93 - Jan 94; Professor Leroy Hulsey
Assembly language programmer
Languages - x86 Assembly
Duties/Experience:
- Write, test and debug assembly language library for use with Lahey
Fortran. Routines included interfacing with HardLock security devices
attached to printer ports, interrupt handling, disk I/O, writing
mouse routines, and direct screen buffer access. Was responsible for
final packaging of a product, and security on said product. Help
facilitate upgrade of software to run under Windows 95.
Miscellaneous Skills
Large scale distributed systems: load balancing, load shedding,
autoscaling, and overload protection for ML serving fleets
ML/LLM inference serving on TPU accelerator hardware
Production incident response at datacenter and fleet scale
Extensive experience with C and C++
Experience with other languages, including a number of assembly
languages and scripting languages such as Python, Perl, PHP,
and Bash
Algorithm optimization
Signal processing, including telephony, voice, and data modulations
Cryptographic system design and implementation
Hardware bringup of new custom boards
RF hardware bringup/troubleshooting/analysis
Algorithm implementation using fixed point math
Creation of cross platform, end user GUI applications using WxWidgets
Unix/Linux system administration
Unix network and systems programming
Education
Spring 1997; Utah State University
BS in electrical engineering, computer emphasis. Minors in math,
physics, and computer science.