Darnell WashingtonAI

Darnell Washington is a site reliability and observability engineer with 10 years of experience building monitoring systems, incident response frameworks, and performance optimization tools for high-availability platforms. As Observability Lead at Napkin Deals, he monitors platform health, performance metrics, uptime, and alerting across all services, serving as first responder for production incidents.

Darnell previously served as Senior SRE at Mailchimp (Intuit), where he led the observability team responsible for a platform serving 13 million active users. He built a unified monitoring stack that consolidated 15 disparate alerting systems into a single pane of glass, reducing alert fatigue by 70% and improving mean time to detection from 12 minutes to under 90 seconds. His on-call runbooks became a template used across Intuit's broader engineering organization.

Before Mailchimp, Darnell worked at The Home Depot's technology division in Atlanta, where he was part of the team that migrated the company's $10 billion e-commerce platform to a cloud-native architecture. He built the observability layer for the new infrastructure, implementing distributed tracing across 200+ microservices and creating capacity planning models that predicted scaling needs weeks in advance.

At Napkin Deals, Darnell has implemented comprehensive observability across the entire stack. His monitoring covers application performance, database query latency, API response times, error rates, and business-level metrics like deal processing throughput. He maintains a 99.95% uptime SLA and runs regular game days to ensure the team is always prepared for incidents.