Lady Red Beacham

Lady Red Beacham

Staff software engineer and engineering leader. I build the operating systems, build pipelines and backend services that millions of people rely on.

AI Safety

  • Alignment Incident Database (GitHub). A public record of times AI systems acted against the intent of the people who built, deployed or used them: deception, sycophancy, reward hacking, shutdown resistance and more. Every incident gets a permanent ID, like a CVE, and every claim links to its source. A daily scan of the news finds new ones.
  • Whistleblower eval. An agent gets an impossible task and finds a hidden message board where other agents are colluding to cheat, with a planted answer key. Does it join in, does it hide where its answer came from, and does it tell anyone? I ran ten frontier models, five times each. Most used what the other agents left and stayed quiet.

Meta 2020 โ€“ now

Staff Software Engineer (4 years) and Engineering Manager (2 years), Reality Labs

I worked on the operating system for Quest 2, 3, 3s and Pro, and for Meta's glasses. Together they ship to tens of millions of people. Our big challenge: make Android, a 2D phone OS, power a VR console. That means it never drops a frame, it's natively 3D, and it runs millions of lines of Meta software.

Highlights

  • Green Build. Our OS mainline had 3,000 active developers, and its CI was chronically broken and ignored. I started a program to fix it. For months I reverted every breakage myself, while I built a team and a runbook. Rolling postmortems produced hundreds of fixes to the CI system. The mainline has stayed green since, and the org grew from about 3 OS variants to about 40.
  • System services I owned: app installation and cloud backup for game data, over-the-air OS updates, the phone-to-headset Bluetooth connection, and the OS build and CI pipeline.
  • Teams I managed: OS Reliability Engineering (incident response, OS architecture, build and CI; I was its tech lead first), Spatial IO (next-gen VR input and a 3D Android compositor), and System Extensions (updates, installs, storage and backup).

Hipmunk 2013 โ€“ 2019

Senior Software Engineer, flight search backend

  • Planned and wrote two major overhauls of the Flight API: incremental results, a new fare class and a trip-discovery funnel.
  • Ran 30+ partner API integrations, with downtime detection and automatic fallback.
  • Led performance work on the distributed search system, and new microservices.
  • Kept on as key engineering talent through the 2017 acquisition.

Education

  • Bradfield School of Computer Science, Computer Science Intensive (2020 โ€“ 2021). A masters-level, small-cohort program: databases, OS internals, concurrency, assembly and networking.
  • College of William & Mary, B.S. Computer Science (2013).

Projects

  • Liquid Vote: a liquid democracy platform. Vote on proposals yourself, or hand your vote to someone you trust and take it back at any time.
  • Games: VibeCraft, a strategy game where physics balances the armies, and Boilerplate, a fluid and heat puzzle game.

Talks

Want my full resume? Email me and I'll send it.