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 — whatever the gap is, whatever's missing, that's what I build. Nineteen years turning what doesn't exist yet into what runs itself: seven at Apple, now at SFMTA.

San Francisco, CA Tea, not coffee Octavia & Cleopatra Reads & writes feminist SF
19+
Years experience
300M+
iTunes users behind the dashboards
3 of 3
Sectors worked · corporate, nonprofit & government
1
Tiptree Award nominee · feminist SF

"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

background

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
Before SFMTA
Apple
7 yrs
Consulting
4 yrs
Elegrity
3 yrs
eBay
1.5 yrs
Education
MS Business Analytics · Saint Mary's · UChicago BA, English Lit
Favorite kind of problem
0 → 1. Building what doesn't exist yet.

Selected work

portfolio
Pagers going quiet — iTunes crash-tracking case study
Portfolio · three told in depth

Making iTunes' crashes countable, and other stories.

Six 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 three lighter pieces on probability, public gardens, and unicorns.

Read the stories →
Practice
Patterns
The questions I keep asking, the two kinds of problems that keep showing up, and the sweet spot where I do my best work.
See the patterns →
The Person
About Nabil
Cats, tea, English literature, three pillars as described by Mary Salome, feminist science fiction off the clock, and twenty years of testimonials.
Meet Nabil →