Casey West
About Casey West, who leads Google Cloud Developer Relations for AI infrastructure and Applied Engineering.
I lead the AI Infrastructure and Applied Engineering Developer Relations teams at Google Cloud. AI Infrastructure is GKE and the hardware beneath it—the accelerators, orchestration, and drivers that keep large training, fine-tuning, and inference jobs running—and the work is helping teams get the most out of the world’s most capable AI hardware. Applied Engineering is a Developer Relations program I started in 2023: Google Cloud engineers co-engineer a mission-critical solution alongside a customer’s own team, on the customer’s project. It is not consulting and it is not sales. Self-sufficiency is the deliverable, and the engagement worked only if the customer no longer needs us when it ends. Across both teams, agents are arriving in production at real scale, and my teams build the governance, security, and performance foundations that let enterprises run them with confidence.
I have spent more than 25 years building internet infrastructure, application platforms, and information security systems, and the work has always come back to the same thing: technology only matters as much as the people who run it. I started in open source with Perl, and some of that code still ships with macOS today. At Pivotal I championed Cloud Foundry to enterprise engineering teams around the world; at WhiteHat Security I rebuilt the software development lifecycle and moved the company to continuous delivery; at Socialtext I led engineering on one of the first commercial wikis. The lesson that held across all of it: the most resilient systems come from teams that are empowered, productive, and trusted to do the work.
Today I am focused on The Agentic Manifesto, an operating model for a world of non-deterministic, autonomous AI. Building for that world means polyglot tool ecosystems on standardized protocols, and development practices that plan for emergent behavior, continuous tuning, and automated governance rather than fighting them.
I speak and write about modern architecture, DevOps, and the cultural shifts that new technology demands of the teams adopting it. You can find me at conferences like KubeCon, OSCON, and QCon, or right here on this blog.
Beyond my professional life, I live in Pittsburgh with my wife and family.
For a detailed look at my professional background, my resume is available here.