Paper Reading: MyRocks: LSM-Tree Database Storage Engine Serving Facebook's Social Graph

Session led by [Dharin Shah](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharinshah/)

**Event description**

Facebook uses MySQL to manage tens of petabytes of data in its main database named the User Database (UDB). UDB serves social activities such as likes, comments, and shares. In the past, Facebook used InnoDB, a B+Tree based storage engine as the backend. The challenge was to find an index structure using less space and write amplification.

LSM-tree has the potential to greatly improve these two bottlenecks. RocksDB, an LSM tree-based key/value store was already widely used in variety of applications but had a very low-level key-value interface. To overcome these limitations, MyRocks, a new MySQL storage engine, was built on top of RocksDB by adding relational capabilities. With MyRocks, using the RocksDB API, significant efficiency gains were achieved while still benefiting from all the MySQL features and tools. The transition was mostly transparent to client applications.

The paper was published at the **International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB)**: [**https://research.facebook.com/publications/myrocks-lsm-tree-database-storage-engine-serving-facebooks-social-graph/**](https://research.facebook.com/publications/myrocks-lsm-tree-database-storage-engine-serving-facebooks-social-graph/).

Paper authors:

- [**Yoshinori Matsunobu**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoshinorimatsunobu/)
- [**Siying Dong**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/siyingdong/)
- Herman Lee

The Transfer Play

In this lesson, we discuss what happens when **employees believe their manager is underperforming and consider escalating the problem to their skip-level leader**. Raising concerns about a manager can be difficult because acknowledging the problem creates significant work for senior leadership. The conversation explores why a single complaint may be dismissed and how multiple independent reports can make an organizational problem much harder to overlook.

- **Understand your skip-level manager’s incentives:** Accepting that a manager is failing may mean managing them out, finding and training a replacement, and temporarily absorbing their responsibilities—giving senior leaders practical reasons to be cautious before acting.
- **A single complaint may be interpreted as an individual conflict:** When only one employee raises a concern, leadership may question whether the issue lies with the manager or the employee making the complaint.
- **Corroborating experiences make concerns more credible:** When several employees independently report the same pattern of behavior, it becomes easier for senior leadership to recognize that the problem may be systemic and requires investigation or action.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

STAR

If you want direct interview support from Alex and Uzair, take their live Maven course with discount code **TARO10**: <https://maven.com/alex-kliotzkin/acing-em-interviews>

Engineering manager interviews focus heavily on **behavioral assessments**, and using a structured response framework like **STAR** can help clearly demonstrate leadership competencies and impact. STAR stands for **Situation, Task, Action, and Result** and is widely recommended for leadership roles due to its clarity and depth.

- **Situation**: Set the context of your story—when, where, and why it happened—so the interviewer understands the environment and background.
- **Task**: Define your responsibility in that situation and any challenges you faced while addressing it.
- **Action**: Detail the specific steps *you personally* took, what you owned, and how you worked with others.
- **Result**: End with measurable outcomes like cost savings, quality improvements, time to market, or customer/team impact. Show the success and its scale.

Coding Round Grades

In this segment, we break down what interviewers really look for in a machine learning coding round. It’s not just about solving the problem—it's about how we think, communicate, and write code that reflects real engineering practices.

- We understand that **weak performance** stems from messy code, poor use of data structures, or inability to explain complexity.
- **Mediocre performance** may reach the right answer but relies heavily on interviewer help, signaling a lack of confidence or strategy.
- A **great performance** involves writing clean, efficient code and clearly explaining trade-offs and scalability.
- To be **exceptional**, we should offer multiple solutions, consider edge cases, and write production-quality code.
- We improve by following a **systematic approach**, thinking out loud, handling edge cases, and prioritizing clean, readable code—just like real ML engineers do in production.

If you want to learn even more from Yayun:

- Book 1 on 1 career guidance with her here: <https://calendly.com/your-friend-yayun/1on1>
- Follow her on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/yayunjin/>

IC7, IC8, and IC9 Expectations

In this lesson, Philip breaks down how expectations change across senior engineering levels, from E7 through E9. Rather than viewing career progression as a checklist of increasingly difficult tasks, he explains that seniority is largely defined by the **scope, duration, and value of the impact you can reliably create**—whether through leading larger organizations, delivering increasingly complex initiatives, or possessing technical expertise that cannot easily be replicated by adding more engineers.

- **Higher levels are defined by expanding scope and influence.** An E7 might influence the work of roughly 50 people and independently drive long-term initiatives, while E8 and E9 impact expands further through organizational breadth, technical depth, strategic importance, or uniquely valuable expertise.
- **At the highest levels, promotion becomes increasingly qualitative.** There is no universal checklist for reaching E8 or E9. Senior engineers can create exceptional value through different archetypes, and recognition at these levels often depends on whether other senior leaders view your impact as operating at their level.
- **Surround yourself with people who create room for growth.** Being the strongest person on a weak team can limit your development and make it difficult to accurately assess your abilities. When senior role models are scarce, finding an experienced coach who can give candid, qualitative feedback may be even more valuable than finding someone whose career you can directly imitate.

Take Some Time To Reflect

We wrap up by reframing layoffs as a rare opportunity to pause, reflect, and intentionally design the next chapter of your career. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- A layoff often comes with severance and time, which is an incredibly valuable resource that gives you space to step off the hamster wheel and think clearly.
- Taking days or even weeks to reflect is worthwhile, since deep self-introspection about career direction, values, and long-term goals is difficult but high leverage.
- Being laid off can surface important questions you may have ignored while grinding, including whether you enjoy your role, your function, or even the tech industry at all.
- Boredom and distance from day-to-day work can spark creativity, learning, and exploration that are nearly impossible when you’re constantly shipping and firefighting.
- With persistence, reflection, and conversations with trusted people, a layoff can become a pivot point that leads to a more aligned, fulfilling next step—even if that path looks very different than before.

Leverage Your Unfair Advantage

We explain how to accelerate your job search after a layoff by intentionally leveraging the advantages already on your résumé. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- We should leverage company brand as an unfair advantage, since recognizable names (Big Tech, well-known startups, or respected niche companies) carry trust and credibility that immediately raise our odds versus the average applicant.
- We can increase our chances by targeting adjacent companies, customers, or competitors where our background naturally fits, instead of applying randomly to roles with no contextual advantage.
- We should confidently lean into domain and product association—using the halo effect of teams, products, or problem spaces we worked on—because perceived relevance often matters more than perfect technical alignment.

Ineffective Evaluation Techniques

We close this section by calling out two common but misleading ways people try to evaluate companies and why we should avoid them.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

- We urge you not to judge a company based on how much you liked or disliked your recruiter or interviewers, because you’ll almost never work with them, and your network’s lived experience inside the company is a far better signal of culture and fit.
- We caution against spending lots of time analyzing financial statements and balance sheets unless you’re actually trained in that area; as engineers, we’re likely to misinterpret the numbers and waste time.
- We recommend instead focusing on conversations about the company’s vision, growth, and people, since fast-growing companies can change dramatically in just a few years and those qualitative signals tend to be much more predictive for your career.

Taro Book Club: The Pragmatic Programmer - Session 1

If you don't have a Taro Premium membership, you can get it with a discount with Bikram's special link here: [**https://www.jointaro.com/r/bikramk104/**](https://www.jointaro.com/r/bikramk104/)

In this #taro-bookclub discussion, we'll go over Chapter 1 of [**"The Pragmatic Programmer"**](https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X) by Andrew Hund & David Thomas

Here's the agenda:

- It's Your Life
- The Cat Ate My Source Code
- Software Entropy
- Stone Soup and Boiled Frogs
- Good Enough Software
- Your Knowledge Portfolio
- communicate

Please send your questions ahead of time to [**Bikram Kashyap**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kashyapbikram/) in the [**Taro Premium**](https://www.jointaro.com/membership/) Slack, so that they can be included in the discussion. *If you don't have the book or want more details on how this all works, check out the #taro-bookclub channel in the Taro Premium Slack as well!*

Get ready for another engaging and informative session!

Getting Extra Help

If you want direct interview support from Alex and Uzair, take their live Maven course with discount code **TARO10**: <https://maven.com/alex-kliotzkin/acing-em-interviews>

Get 1 on 1 coaching from Alex here (mention Taro and get 10% off): <https://www.alexkliotzkin.com/>

To succeed in Engineering Manager interviews, we need to do more than prepare our answers—we must *practice intentionally and iteratively*. This video highlights how structured practice can dramatically improve our communication, clarity, and confidence.

- **Mentally Rehearse with Visualization:** We should regularly visualize being in the interview, anticipating questions, and mentally walking through our stories and responses. This builds fluency and composure.
- **Write Stories for Guidance, Not Scripts:** Documenting our stories helps solidify what we want to say, but we shouldn’t memorize or regurgitate them. The goal is clarity on the *core signals* and themes we want to convey.
- **Record and Review Ourselves:** Watching ourselves on video is uncomfortable but invaluable. It reveals nervous tics, verbosity, or lack of clarity, and helps us iterate quickly.
- **Practice with Others for Realistic Feedback:** Mock interviews with someone—ideally a professional coach—simulate real pressure and provide tailored feedback. This is the most effective way to get interview-ready

Paper Reading: Self-supervised Vision Transformers (Foundational Model)

Session led by [Mandar Deshpande](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandardeshpande1995/)

Dino is a self-supervised learning approach for computer vision tasks. It leverages vision transformers without using any labeled data. Dino v2 introduces several improvements over its predecessor, enhancing performance and scalability. It achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks. Notably, Dino v2 demonstrates strong performance on downstream tasks such as image classification and object detection.

We will be walking through

- Basics of computer vision
- Self supervised learning
- ViT (vision transformers)
- DINO
- DINO v2 model

Paper link - [**https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07193**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07193)

[Event link](https://www.jointaro.com/event/paper-reading-dino-v2-ie-foundational-model-for-computer-vision/)

[Paper Reading] Deploy ML Models from Lab to Production

Session led by: [Akshika Wijesundara PhD](https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshika/)

If you don't have a Taro Premium membership, you can get it with a discount with Akshika's special link here: [**https://www.jointaro.com/r/akshikw802/**](https://www.jointaro.com/r/akshikw802/)

**WHAT YOU'LL LEARN**

- **Discover the benefits of CI/CD pipelines:** Learn how CI/CD pipelines streamline the model building, testing, and deployment processes, enabling rapid iteration and continuous improvement.
- **Containerize your ML code:** Understand the steps and advantages of containerizing your machine learning code to ensure consistency, portability, and efficient resource management.
- **Leverage the AWS stack for ML workloads:** Explore how to effectively utilize AWS as your cloud infrastructure provider to run and scale your machine learning workloads with ease and reliability.

**WHY THIS TOPIC MATTERS**

MLOps isn't just about fancy models - it's about getting them working for real! Learn how to deploy, maintain, and collaborate on ML projects, making you a highly-demand expert who can turn machine learning into real-world impact.

There Is Nothing Wrong With You

We close by reframing layoffs as a survivable, even formative, career event rather than a personal failure. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Being laid off is not a reflection of your ability or worth, since layoffs are driven by executives making decisions with incomplete information and often feel effectively random from an individual’s perspective.
- There is no value in self-blame or overanalyzing what you could have done differently, because once a layoff happens, the only productive move is to look forward.
- With severance as temporary financial runway, layoffs can be treated as a reset point to reflect, recover, and intentionally choose your next step, knowing this is a normal part of a long tech career.

Master the Art of Receiving Quality Feedback (from an ex-Meta Staff Researcher)

In this time of uncertainty in the workplace and job market, what’s one skill you can develop that would **yield disproportionate rewards**?

It’s hard to pinpoint *the one* skill, but I believe the **ability to ask for, receive, and iterate on feedback** is incredibly important. Adaptability is what helps us not just survive, but thrive—and adaptability begins with how well we take in and work with feedback.

When you learn to process feedback effectively, **you develop a kind of likability and professional superpower** that organizations and leaders find hard to ignore.

We hear feedback all the time, so what exactly are we trying to get better at? Most of the feedback we receive is vague and hard to act on. Think about examples like “improve your communication” or “increase your coding speed”—where do you even start? The **key is in asking for feedback** proactively, clarifying and chunking it down into something actionable, working on it, and then circling back to check if you’ve understood and implemented it well.

In this talk, we’ll learn how to do exactly that—a process I call “**exhausting the feedback process**,” a phrase I often use in my coaching practice. We’ll also explore how to handle feedback that’s just plain off the mark (spoiler: it’s rarely useful to say that outright to the person giving it).

Yogi on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/yogi1/>

Embodying The Leader

If you want direct interview support from Alex and Uzair, take their live Maven course with discount code **TARO10**: <https://maven.com/alex-kliotzkin/acing-em-interviews>

In this lesson, we learn how to effectively showcase leadership qualities during engineering manager interviews by understanding the most commonly assessed leadership abilities. Interviewers are assigned specific attributes to evaluate, and crafting thoughtful, real-world stories that highlight these traits is essential.

- **We prepare stories around 9 common leadership abilities**, including growing talent, delivering under pressure, and influencing stakeholders, knowing these form the backbone of most behavioral interview questions.
- **We ensure each story highlights not just outcomes, but the judgment and systems we used**, especially in situations involving conflict, ambiguity, or strategic risk.
- **We practice showcasing our resilience and decision-making**, such as dealing with underperformers, making fast-paced calls under time pressure, or navigating conflict with senior stakeholders.
- **We recognize that good answers require emotional maturity**, thoughtful communication, and the ability to reflect on learnings—not perfection or bravado.
- **We strive to embody senior leadership through our communication style**, avoiding over-explaining, exaggeration, or emotional volatility, and focusing instead on clarity, calmness, and authenticity.

Level-Specific Expectations

As with system design interviews, behavioral interview expectations increase with seniority. This round is our chance to bring our resume to life by showing how we think and lead as ML engineers.

- **Junior ML engineers** should focus on clearly explaining their contributions and demonstrating how they applied ML techniques with guidance.
- **Senior engineers** need to showcase how they led ML projects end-to-end, made thoughtful trade-offs, and influenced product or technical decisions.
- **Staff-level engineers** should highlight strategic, cross-team contributions—like building reusable ML platforms, solving ambiguous problems, and mentoring others.

This is where we demonstrate not just *what* we’ve done, but *how* we think—our process, leadership, and impact.

If you want to learn even more from Yayun:

- Book 1 on 1 career guidance with her here: <https://calendly.com/your-friend-yayun/1on1>
- Follow her on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/yayunjin/>

Breaking The Plateau

In this lesson, we discuss why **career progression at senior levels requires developing new skills rather than simply becoming better at the skills that earned your earlier promotions**. Hard work and strong execution can drive early career advancement, but moving beyond levels such as staff engineer or frontline manager requires learning to delegate, communicate, influence others, and let go of responsibilities that no longer belong at your level.

- **Stop doing your current job harder:** Working longer or producing more of the same output may not demonstrate readiness for the next level. Advancement requires understanding what is fundamentally different about the role above you.
- **Learn what to let go of and what to develop:** Senior roles require stepping away from hands-on control and micromanagement while developing skills such as delegation, communication, and enabling other people to perform effectively.
- **Ask for advice from people who have already made the transition:** Talk to leaders one or two levels above you about what they had to stop doing, what they needed to learn, and what they see holding you back. Asking for advice can also produce more useful insights than simply asking for feedback.

Original podcast link:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc&t=24s)

Tailoring Your Answers

If you want direct interview support from Alex and Uzair, take their live Maven course with discount code **TARO10**: <https://maven.com/alex-kliotzkin/acing-em-interviews>

To deliver unforgettable interview answers, we need to learn how to tailor our responses to match the company, the role, and the specific audience we’re speaking to. This session explains how to adapt our stories based on context, organization type, and our own leadership philosophy—even when we haven’t faced a specific scenario before.

- **Tailor Stories to the Team and Business**
  - We must deeply understand the hiring team and the company’s business context to highlight the most relevant parts of our story.
  - Even small adjustments—altering 10% of a story—can have a big impact in aligning with the company’s values and needs.
- **Adapt Answers Based on Company Type**
  - For example, when answering a question about influencing stakeholders, we need to highlight different dynamics depending on whether it’s a startup (external stakeholders like customers or investors) or a big org (internal cross-functional teams).
  - Similarly, questions about balancing delivery vs. quality should be approached differently for consulting roles (focus on fast delivery and milestones) vs. product roles (focus on long-term impact, maintainability, and operational excellence).
- **Responding to Questions You Haven’t Faced Before**
  - If we haven’t directly experienced a situation (e.g., managing underperformers or doing capacity planning), we should draw on adjacent stories and clearly articulate our leadership philosophy and approach.
  - It’s helpful to describe what we’d do in the first 90 days on the job—such as building a plan or upskilling—and how that reflects our values and learning mindset.
- **Use Leadership Philosophy as a Guide**
  - Our answers should reflect consistent values, such as building high-performing teams, holding people accountable, and prioritizing quality.
  - Even without a direct experience, framing our response through this philosophy helps convey credibility, ownership, and potential.

Leadership Bar

If you want direct interview support from Alex and Uzair, take their live Maven course with discount code **TARO10**: <https://maven.com/alex-kliotzkin/acing-em-interviews>

In this lesson, the instructor explains the core attributes that engineering manager (EM) interviewers, especially directors and above, look for when hiring. Unlike IC roles, EM hiring is predominantly trust-based and focused on leadership capabilities over technical depth.

- **Behavioral Over Technical**: 80% of the EM hiring decision is based on behavioral criteria like trustworthiness, resilience, and ownership, while only 20% is focused on technical competency such as architecture and system design.
- **Understand the Decision-Maker’s World**: Directors and VPs prioritize reliability, communication skills, and the ability to handle uncertainty and people problems over deep technical expertise.
- **Subjective Evaluation**: EM interviews aren’t about getting “right” answers. Instead, they're conversational and context-driven, evaluating fit with the team, culture, and leadership expectations.
- **Demonstrate Ownership and Initiative**: Candidates must show extreme ownership, proactive problem-solving, and the ability to deliver results, even outside formal responsibilities.
- **Adapt Communication**: EMs need to adjust messaging depending on the audience, from engineers to upper leadership, showing mastery in stakeholder communication.

This Facebook Engineering Director Quit To Sail The World

After more than 10 years working at Meta (Facebook), James quit to work on his boat full-time. While sailing, he also contributes to open-source! <https://github.com/tinyplex/tinybase>

Tech Career Growth Videos

Our instructional videos provide software engineers with insights needed for career growth. Masterclasses go incredibly in-depth on a specific tech topic while case studies are real examples from established engineering leaders.