Nabil Arnaoot monogram Nabil Arnaoot
Nabil Arnaoot — Animal Crossing character portrait standing in a village
Project Leader · Always up for a good problem

0 → 1 is infinite

Systems, trainings, processes, documentation — I build the thing nobody's realized is missing. Over two decades of it: seven at Apple, now at SFMTA.

San Francisco, CA Tea, not coffee Octavia & Cleopatra Reads & writes feminist SF
Years in tech
25+
NonprofitCorporateGovernment
See the career timeline →
Systems kept current
500K
Kernel updates across 40+ engineering groups, Apple
Read the case study →
Tiptree Award
1nomination
Feminist science fiction, written off the clock
About the writing →

"He walks into ambiguous situations, identifies what hasn't been addressed, and gets results — all while getting a smile out of everyone in the room."

Brianna Gamp · Information Security Leader

The work, briefly

An English major's career, in disguise.

From novels to dashboards, the work never really changed. It starts with reading closely for what isn't said and staying on a question until the real one surfaces — then figuring out how to explain it so the team can move. English-major roots, business-analyst present, stubbornly curious throughout.

Current role
Principal Business Analyst, SFMTA
Favorite kind of problem
The blank-page kind — making something brand new.
Career Apple 7 yrs · Consulting 2 · Elegrity 3 · eBay 1.5 — now SFMTA Education MS Business Analytics, Saint Mary's · BA English Lit, UChicago

Selected work

Pagers going quiet — iTunes crash-tracking case study

Making iTunes' crashes countable, and other stories.

Seven projects: from quieting the SRE pagers at iTunes, to kernel updates across 500,000 systems, to building an internal-consulting motion for eBay site security — plus lighter side quests on probability, public gardens, unicorns, and Nametag, a party app I'm prototyping.

Read the stories →
Patterns
The questions I keep asking, the two kinds of problems that keep showing up, and how I think about giving an org just enough structure.
See the patterns →
About Nabil
English literature, San Francisco, feral cats, three things Mary Salome says I always bring, teaching, and feminist science fiction.
Meet Nabil →