Engine Yard

70 people dedicated to supporting your needs, working from the USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

About Us

Engine Yard came about in early 2006 because we saw a genuine need: customers were developing business-critical Rails apps, but they didn't want to worry about deployment issues, nor did they want to hire IT staff to manage servers.

Customers wanted Rails-focused 24/7 operations support on top of great infrastructure, plus they wanted a smooth path from 100 users to 100,000 users.

That's what Engine Yard is all about.

Perhaps most importantly, we really enjoy what we're doing and we believe in running a healthy, profitable business that will last well into the future.

Some customers want to know if we're financially stable: we achieved continued profitability starting in mid-2007. And in January, 2008, we announced a $3.5M investment from Benchmark Capital. Our plans for the investment are explained in this Engine Yard blog entry.

The Team (not all shown)

Ezra Zygmuntowicz (USA west) Software Architect Ezra is known as a contributor in the Rails community, especially regarding deployment. Ezra took to Rails in 2004 and joined Engine Yard in mid-2006. Ezra published a complete Rails deployment book through The Pragmatic Programmers in early 2007.	Evan Phoenix (USA west) Software Architect Evan started Rubinius in 2006 as a new Ruby interpreter, most of which is written in Ruby, which means Ruby developers can contribute to the language. Engine Yard is happy to support Evan in his work on Rubinius.
Jayson Vantuyl (USA mid) Software Architect Jayson is an amazing Linux system administrator, designer of Linux OS's, clustering, and networking - among many other things. He's responsible for much of the magic that makes the cluster run.	Ed Muller (USA mid) Automation Architect Ed developed an early cluster that inspired Jayson to create the early Engine Yard infrastructure. Ed is an expert with Gentoo Linux, clustering, LVM, and our SAN systems - addition to numerous other talents.
Tom Mornini (USA west) CTO and Co-Founder Tom Mornini co-founded Engine Yard to provide the infrastructure and support necessary to fuel development of Ruby on Rails applications. He has spent nearly 30 years as a software programmer and software architect and 20 years leading companies as a serial entrepreneur. Prior to starting Engine Yard in 2006 with co-founders Lance Walley, Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Jayson Vantuyl, he created FaceBridge Research, Inc., a billing service for video-over-IM systems, and InfoMania Printing and Prepress, Inc., an innovator in Internet print procurement. He also served as software architect at Quios.com, responsible for designing the platform that allowed the mobile messaging company to grow into a global provider with more than 130 employees.	Lance Walley (USA west) CEO and Co-Founder Lance is CEO and Co-Founder. He started working with computers in junior high school (1982), and although he's been a software and hardware developer about 50% of the time, Lance's interest is more on the business and organizational side of things. This leads him to start and grow businesses with partners who have greater technical vision. He started an embedded computing business with a friend in 1987, then followed with several businesses: 1) mobile phone text messaging; 2) billing systems for instant-messaging; and 3) staffing & recruiting for Perl and Ruby on Rails. Lance co-founded Engine Yard in 2006 with Tom Mornini, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and Jayson Vantuyl.
Yehuda Katz (USA West) Merb Developer Yehuda, in addition to being the co-author of jQuery In Action, a contributor to Ruby in Practice and co-author of the upcoming Merb in Action, is a core contributor to DataMapper and jQuery. Before coming to Engine Yard, he worked for Procore Technologies developing a Ruby on Rails tool for construction project management. Yehuda is a Merb core developer, contributes to Rubinius, and is taking a lead role in the development of our new Control Panel.	Lee Jensen (USA west) Support Manager Lee Jensen joined our application support group in Sept. 2007. He has lots of experience managing Rails deployments and keeping servers running smoothly. He's been working with Rails almost since the beginning. Before Engine Yard, he helped several companies build or improve the performance of their Rails apps.
Joshua Sierles (EU/Spain) Automation Developer Joshua did systems administration and security research for 5 years until moving to Spain 6 years ago, where he began doing web development in PHP, then Rails. Hes been an active member of the Rails community since 2005 and participate in the development of Rails i18n Globalize plugin (http://www.globalize-rails.org) and the Mootools (http://mootools.net) javascript framework. You can see some of Joshua's dev and admin at http://mog.com and kyero.com.	Brian Ford (USA west) Rubinius Developer Brian knew within 2 minutes of reading Evan's blog post on adding Continuations that Rubinius was going to be successful - he grabbed the code and hasn't looked back since. Brian was enamored with RSpec and decided a full set of specs for Ruby would be key to developing Rubinius as fast as possible. Ruby is his all-around favorite language and his hope for Rubinius is to make it possible to continue adopting the best features of other languages into Ruby. Brian is finishing his math degree at Portland State and snowboards on the weekends on Mt Hood.
Eric Hodel (USA West) Rubinius Developer Eric Hodel has been a Rubyist since late 2001. In that time he has worked on over 40 gems, become a Ruby committer and a RubyGems maintainer. He lives in Seattle where he hacks with Ryan Davis at Vivace, and is a member of the Seattle Ruby Brigade. Before coming to Engine Yard he worked for Lime Wire and 43 Things writing Rails websites.	Max Mohun (USA west) DBA Maximilian met Tom and Lance at Quios.com in 1999 where he worked as the Lead Oracle DBA. Maximilian has been a DBA for 9 years, and has been working with Linux since 1997. As Data Integrity Manager, he is responsible for all databases and backups at Engine Yard. He joined Engine Yard in late 2007.
Taylor Weibley (USA east) Director of Support Taylor joined our application support group in October, 2007. Taylor has years of engineering and administration experience in Linux, Windows, and networking. In the past, he virtualized data centers and created unique web sites utilizing Rails. Taylor is now helping Engine Yard customers engineer solutions and deploy applications.	Jamie van Dyke (UK) Automation Developer Jamie van Dyke has worked with Rails since the beginning of 2005. He played a large part in the documenting of Rails, is a core Rails contributor and is the publisher of multiple gems and plugins. He currently works at Engine Yard as the Application Support Manager for Europe.
Zachary Roetemeyer (USA mid) Cluster Engineer Zach has done systems administration and development for 8 years, most recently working on several public websites and an intranet cluster. He's provided network and security administration, and supported numerous other systems, from email to databases. He's also worked with Xen virtualization.	Dylan Egan (Australia) Support Engineer Dylan Egan has been working with Rails since 2005 and loves it. He previously freelanced for a range of clients. He's been enjoying Gentoo since its earlier days, likes configuring and deploying servers and is looking forward to working at EY and with the team.
John Hornbeck (USA mt.) Support Manager John has been involved with open source since 1999. He is a contributing member of Rubinius and was a Google Summer of Code Mentor for Ruby Central in 2007. He was a founding member of the Ubuntu Documentation Team in 2004 and helped with the launch of Ubuntu. In 2005 he formed his company 42squared, LLC which focused on building Rails applications. He joined Engine Yard in November of 2007.	Galin Vassilev (USA mid) Systems Administrator Galin met Jayson in 2003 as a colleague. He had some experience with Linux before (Red Hat and Mandrake at the time), when Jayson took him as a disciple. Galin owes to him the foundation of what he knows about Linux today. At Jayson's suggestion Galin focused his efforts on Gentoo and is now an avid user and fan of that Linux distribution doing system administration of Gentoo based clusters.
Caleb Tennis (USA mid) Cluster Engineer Caleb handles management and maintenance of our Gentoo portage tree and is our liaison to the Gentoo community. He has been a Gentoo Linux developer for over five years and has been doing Linux systems administration for ten. Caleb has a background in application development, working for a small engineering company that does interesting things around diesel engine technologies. He has a master's degree in electrical engineering.	Corey Donohoe (USA mid) Automation Developer Corey was one of our earliest application support staff members. He's been into Rails for some time and worked with Ezra on several Rails projects prior to Engine Yard. Recently, Corey's been tapped to move from Support to Development. He's helped get Application Support to the great place it is today, and hopefully he can do the same in his new area.
Tim Rea (USA west) Purchasing Manager Tim is our hardware purchasing and build manager. He coordinates the purchasing of components and helps in the assembly of clusters. A longtime friend of Lance, Tim has a degree from San Jose State University and more recently got an education in networking.	Loren Hale (USA west) Project Manager Loren Hale has been working with Lance and Tom for many years. He is skilled in organizational infrastructure and business process management. He makes sure we have the tools in place to keep organized and assists with customer service.
Riki Crusha (USA west) Finance Officer Riki Crusha has also been working with Lance and Tom for many years. She keeps track of money and generally makes sure that office and operational processes stay on track.	Ronelly Taborite (USA west) Administrative Support Ronelly is the newest addition to our Administrative Team. She has 10+ years of diverse international experience in administrative and business management with both established and start up companies.
Brie McMahon (USA west) Accounting Analyst Brie has over 25 years of administrative and accounting experience with both small business and large corporate entities. Returning to her accounting roots, Brie joined the Engine Yard team in December of 2007 as an accounting analyst.

• Where We Are

  
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• Our History

  We've been working professionally in software and hardware companies since the late-1980's.

  As young adults, we started or joined businesses where our skills were profitable. We liked technology and we liked making money by making customers happy.

  Through the 90's, we managed a number of small/medium-sized businesses in areas like embedded computing, digital printing, and high-volume text messaging. (For the hardware and robotics folks reading this, we co-founded the company that makes BASIC Stamp® tiny computers.)

  We got into Unix/Linux and Perl in 1995, which led us into the first internet revolution (Web 1.0). By the late-90's, we were building high-volume web sites for companies in San Francisco.

  Ruby on Rails attracted our attention in 2004, and by late-2005, we were working with early Rails clients around the USA through our staffing/recruiting company, Quality Humans, Inc.