Engineering Spotlight: Tay Nishimura

Tay Nishimura, an infrastructure engineer on the Distributed Caching team at Datadog, shares her journey through the tech industry. Starting as a mathematician and visual thinker, she transitioned to computer science with internships at Amazon and Google. However, she struggled with adapting to the practical demands of software development and feeling like an outsider in the industry. After switching jobs and realizing her passion for site reliability engineering (SRE), Tay pursued this path despite initial doubts about her experience. She developed ToyNet, an open-source learning platform with network emulation, which helped prove her capabilities to potential employers. At Datadog, Tay's visual thinking style became a major asset in understanding complex systems and communicating effectively with her team. Throughout her career, she found support among other women in tech who faced similar communication and expectation challenges. Today, Tay is a member of the caching platform team at Datadog and continues to contribute to Project Reclass, a nonprofit vocational program aimed at teaching technical skills to the incarcerated and military veterans.