“Focus, Build, and Never Stop Learning.”
Gabe Ochoa is an engineering leader, technologist, builder, and advisor whose career reflects a rare ability to bridge the physical and digital worlds. A mechanical engineer by training and a software leader by evolution, Gabe has built his career around solving complex problems, developing high-performing teams, and creating technology that improves how people live, work, move, and connect. His leadership is grounded in curiosity, empathy, execution, and the belief that great products are built closest to the people who use them.
Gabe began his professional journey with a passion for building physical things. After earning his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, he entered the world of product design, prototyping, manufacturing, and smart hardware. Early roles at Quirky and Wink gave him hands-on exposure to connected products, embedded devices, vendor collaboration, customer support operations, and large-scale product refurbishment. These formative experiences shaped his practical, systems-minded approach to engineering leadership.
As his career progressed, Gabe transitioned from mechanical systems into software infrastructure, reliability, and distributed computing. At Wink, he became a key contributor to site reliability engineering, helping migrate applications from Heroku to AWS-based Kubernetes clusters while strengthening infrastructure practices across the organization. This work marked an important turning point in his career, combining his builder’s mindset with the discipline of scalable software operations.
At Squarespace, Gabe advanced into senior infrastructure leadership, where he helped guide teams responsible for compute, traffic, storage, data center operations, and security. He led major platform modernization initiatives, including the migration of thousands of virtual machines to bare-metal Kubernetes infrastructure, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes while improving recovery speed and lowering costs. He also helped build internal training programs, served as an incident commander, and supported pre-IPO operational readiness through infrastructure controls and compliance collaboration.
Gabe later served as Head of Engineering at Numina, where he returned to an area especially meaningful to him: the intersection of software, sensors, hardware, and real-world data. Leading engineering, product development, and R&D, he oversaw edge AI computer vision products, hardware systems, data platforms, public APIs, dashboards, and supply chain planning. His leadership helped improve data accuracy by 20 to 50 percent, reduce software shipping cycles from months to under one week, and build a multidisciplinary team spanning hardware, firmware, machine learning, data science, and full-stack engineering.
Today, Gabe serves as a Senior Engineering Manager at Datadog, where he leads complex engineering organizations focused on transactional storage, application data platforms, and data observability. His work has included leading teams responsible for Postgres, internal key-value systems, search, replication, caching, and observability products. He has helped scale new products from early concepts into revenue-generating businesses, including Data Streams Monitoring and Data Jobs Monitoring, while also delivering major infrastructure cost reductions and platform simplification.
In addition to his corporate leadership, Gabe is the founder of Built by Experiment, a personal product lab where he continues to sharpen his zero-to-one product instincts. Through AI-first SaaS products such as txt.wedding, Green Thumb, and Caring Loop, he remains close to the customer, the code, and the realities of building useful products from scratch. This hands-on entrepreneurial work reflects one of his defining principles: leaders make better decisions when they stay close to the work.
Gabe is especially strong in scaling engineering teams, building organizational structure, launching new products, operating software infrastructure, and connecting technical strategy to business outcomes. He has led teams through hypergrowth, platform migrations, product launches, cost optimization efforts, and operational transformation. His experience spans software, transportation, energy, consumer products, connected devices, data infrastructure, IoT, hardware, and early-stage company environments.
Beyond his technical achievements, Gabe is known as a people-centered leader who values inclusion, empathy, teaching, and personal growth. He is comfortable speaking, presenting, mentoring, and helping others understand complex technical systems. His involvement in maker communities, woodworking, gardening, and nonprofit work with Brooklyn Industrial Arts further reflects his belief in building communities where people can learn, create, and do meaningful work together.
Gabe’s board and advisory value comes from the breadth of his experience across startups, bankruptcies, scaling organizations, infrastructure-heavy businesses, and customer-driven product environments. He brings a practical operator’s perspective, a deep technical foundation, and the ability to see through complexity to identify what matters most. For companies seeking guidance on engineering leadership, product execution, infrastructure strategy, organizational scaling, and technology that touches the physical world, Gabe offers both strategic insight and hands-on credibility.
Character:
Gabe leads with empathy, curiosity, and a genuine desire to help others do their best work. His career reflects humility, resilience, and a consistent commitment to learning, teaching, and building with purpose.
Knowledge:
He brings deep expertise across mechanical engineering, software infrastructure, distributed systems, Kubernetes, IoT, hardware, AI-enabled products, and engineering management. His knowledge is strengthened by direct experience building products, scaling teams, improving platforms, and operating mission-critical technology.
Strategic:
Gabe understands how to connect technical decisions to customer value, business growth, cost efficiency, and long-term platform health. He is especially effective at simplifying complex systems, identifying leverage points, and helping organizations move quickly without losing sight of the bigger vision.
Communication:
Communicating with clarity, practicality, and authenticity, making complex technical topics accessible to teams, executives, customers, and stakeholders. His speaking, teaching, and mentoring experience allow him to build alignment, create trust, and help others move from uncertainty to action.
