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About Emil

Table of Contents

Work #

I lead engineering organizations. My leadership style prioritizes developing leadership at all levels to facilitate aligned but decentralized execution, focused on rapid iteration to deliver high quality product to customers.

I helped shape the growth of the engineering organization at Toast from ~30 engineers in 2016 to over 500 in 2022. The hypergrowth of the organization involved collaboration with many other leaders to handle:

  • recruiting and evolving recruiting practices
  • defining the career ladder and promotion process
  • the on-call and incident response process
  • defining and iterating on global R&D onboarding and enablement
  • establishing the Dublin office

I have hired or promoted leaders from new graduates to the director / principal engineer level.

Over my career, my teams have built:

  • Internal tooling and training for >500 developers
  • Fintech / Payment Processing services supporting >$100m in daily processing volume
  • SaaS B2C2B (Sales Enablement products) and B2C (Digital food ordering) products scaling from 10k to 250k WAUs
  • Enterprise infrastructure (virtualization and database solutions)

Find more information on LinkedIn.

Academia #

I completed my PhD at MIT’s Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems research group, under Prof. Frans Kaashoek and Prof. Robert T Morris. My research focused on peer-to-peer storage systems, where I was a lead developer of the Chord/DHash distributed hash table.

My interests included practical distributed systems, security, and network measurement.

Music #

I play the piano, with a focus on classical music. I studied at the Manhattan School of Music’s Pre-College Division under Solomon Mikowsky and Robin Freund-Epstein.

Emil Sit
Author
Emil Sit
Emil leads and scales technical organizations. Between 2016 and 2024, he was an engineering director at Toast.