One Year at PRH

Published on October 13, 2026

September 2nd marked one year of working at Penguin Random House. I wrote a short retrospective on LinkedIn, but I’d like to go deeper on it.

Back in August of 2025, I was elated to get the offer. I’ve technically been a PRH customer since before I knew they existed, and everyone I met during the process was both smart and humble. Simply: they’re people I enjoyed talking with and feel (still do! Present tense!) I can learn a lot from, when it comes to tech, people, and business. I enjoy reading, the written word, and the spread of knowledge, so it’s really great to make a living doing things I like in the service of literature. On top of that, I found out that Penguin was hiring for dedicated cloud and infrastructure ICs to support data science from my now-colleague and long-time friend K.T. Chang, who is a truly kind person and just a class act all around. He is someone I hope to know for many many more decades, which I can say for everyone I’ve met here, even going all the way up to Nihar Malaviya, who I was fortunate enough to meet a few weeks after joining.

I left Prudential in June 2016, so it’d been about a decade since I worked in an enterprise organization of this age or size. I think it’s appropriate to say that there is an adjustment phase, not that there has been one, since there’s parts of the business and the code base I still don’t know exist, even in the strictest interpretation of my job responsibilities as “resident K8S and DevOps guy,” which I try to exceed daily.

I’d like to enumerate a few things I appreciate about working here and being back in the enterprise world again:

Big companies present their own interesting challenges. When I was on the job hunt and I told people I was looking to leave the startup world, I would get some… pretty strange responses sometimes. The reality of the situation is that no job or company is for everyone. A lot of large enterprises are still early in their adoption of data science and The Cloud (which is a constantly changing organism, so there is always something important to investigate and learn), and there’s a lot of space to define your own role, even at a century-old publishing giant owned by an even older multimedia giant. Having a hand in both code that runs in our fulfillment centers and stuff that Data Science runs in the cloud is neat. No better way to put it. Every day I’m working with people across 4-6 countries to put new ML products into production, making our existing infra more efficient, and keeping the on-prem and cloud software we’re using to get amazing books out to people worldwide beautiful and pristine.

Stability does not mean stagnation. Something I greatly appreciate at PRH is the number of veteran Unix experts around. I talk on a daily basis with people who’ve been mucking around for decades with parts of Linux I didn’t know existed. These folks are all kind, humble, and accessible, too. Keeping stuff running and getting new stuff into production at a publishing giant is a distinct challenge from what I saw on the last few teams I worked with. Some of the free time I’ve got is going into things away from vim, like working on music (maybe there’ll be something concrete to share with the world there soon? 👀), but on the tech side I’ve been diving into Golang and using Iximiuz Labs and my corporate Udemy subscription to rapidly become fluent in parts of Linux and Kubernetes that seemed impenetrable to me 18 months ago.

There are plenty of enthusiasts and hackers in enterprise, which is something a few people I spoke with during my job hunt were skeptical of. The point got touched on before but it’s worth repeating. With the stability that a place of this size and nature has, you’ve got some space and breathing room to explore what interests you, and identify how that intersects with your work. Working with a bajillion other people can cultivate humility in a different way than having to do it all yourself as the first or second DevOps IC at a startup can; one teaches you how much we rely on other people, the other teaches you how much there is that you don’t know.

I’m really fortunate to be in a place where when it comes to employment, I can choose people I like and a mission that resonates with me, and gratitude for that is always top of my mind. In my original post on this, I said I’m hoping to retire from PRH. I still am, and I’m still confident it’s possible. This is much more of a public journal entry style of post, but I still enjoyed writing it; they can’t all be purely educational.