Meet the Ampliteer: Brian Giori

At Amplitude, our digital analytics platform enables companies to build better products. What's the power behind our products? Our people!

In our #MeetTheAmpliteer series, we’re amplifying their stories and honoring their achievements in shaping data-driven success.

This installment of the series spotlights Brian Giori, staff software engineer and recent winner of Amplitude’s Values Award for Ownership.

Tell us about yourself, your role in powering Amplitude, and your personal journey that brought you to where you are today.

I’m a software engineer working on Amplitude Experiment, leading engineering efforts for our feature evaluation infrastructure and software development kits (SDKs). I joined Amplitude in April of 2021 and worked on Amplitude Experiment just before the product went to general availability a few months later. Since then, I have helped develop and maintain all 10 of our experiment SDKs and helped scale our evaluation infrastructure from 100 requests per second to over 20k requests per second (with no end in sight).
I started my career in the Internet of Things (IoT) device management space, first working on the devices, then the mobile libraries to communicate with the devices, and then the cloud infrastructure to communicate with the mobile libraries. This experience building an end-to-end system has translated well to my work on Experiment’s feature management platform, which is a critical piece of our customer’s applications.

How does your role at Amplitude allow you to contribute to the company's mission of helping companies bring “Power to their Products?” Can you share an example of a particularly impactful project you've worked on?

Amplitude Experiment’s end-to-end feature management and experimentation platform powers many of our customers’ product features. Our customers can use feature flags to launch new features or experiments with metrics built using Amplitude Analytics. My role as an engineer working closely with our customers means that I can directly impact their ability to succeed and grow their feature management and experimentation cultures.

I think the most impactful project I’ve worked on is local evaluation. This is the industry standard for feature flagging. Still, at Amplitude, we started with our strength. We built an API for evaluating a user within the Amplitude platform to use advanced targeting powered by existing data in Amplitude’s Behavioral Graph. But high-volume server-side environments could not afford to make a network call per evaluation, so we needed to run the evaluations in the SDK rather than in Amplitude’s services.

This was a challenge because of how our existing evaluation code was developed. To solve this, I designed and developed a new local evaluation and flag data model optimized for code simplicity, portability, evaluation flexibility, and backward compatibility.

Overall, the majority of our largest enterprise customers on Experiment use local evaluation in some capacity to power feature flagging experimentation within their system.

Amplitude's cultural values of humility, ownership, and growth mindset are foundational to the company's success. How do you embody these values in your work?

I feel a high degree of personal responsibility for our customers' success using Experiment. This means I have to own many aspects of the product that impact the customer experience and take feedback from customers not as a slight against myself but as a place for improvement and growth.

Amplitude offers a variety of benefits and perks to its employees. Which has made the biggest difference for you in your wellness and well-being?

I really like the health and wellness stipend!

What is the #1 thing that most enables you to do your best work at Amplitude?

My teammates and all the other employees I work with at Amplitude!

We know that music can be a powerful motivator. What song or artist do you turn to when you need an extra boost of energy to power through a tough project or challenge at work?

I’ve been listening to a lot of Drum and Bass recently. Especially my all-time favorite D&B album, Hold Your Colour, by Pendulum.

Also, I love Dougie Poole's work. I patiently await every opportunity to see him live when he tours the Bay Area.