Melody MeckfesselCo Founder

United States - San Francisco, California

Melody is the co-founder and CEO of Observable. Observable is a collaborative, web-based platform empowering data scientists, data analysts, developers and decision makers to uncover new insights and make better data-driven decisions. Observable brings data, context, and logic together in one place - the collaborative data canvas. Observable helps everyone make sense of the world with data.

Melody is a hands-on technology leader with more than 20 years experience building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and solving problems at scale.

Before co-founding Observable, Melody was a VP of Engineering at Google, where she led DevOps for Google including Google’s Cloud Platform’s tools and systems. Her team powered the world’s most advanced continuously delivered software, enabling development teams to turn ideas into reliable, scalable production systems. The team specialized in language support and tooling, including Go, Java, C++, Python, and others. She also led teams in Google’s core search systems, search quality and cluster management.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, she began her career in programming for startups and enterprise companies.

Building technology and working with data is a team sport. Melody works toward solutions to change the industry toward true diversity and inclusion, and is committed to working on that for however long it takes. She champions programs to bridge the gap for under-represented engineers. Writing software and creating data visualizations with kindness and empathy and letting people show up as they are is and always will be her life’s work.

She is passionate about improving exploration and understanding of data. By focusing on the humans (users and engineers), good results will follow.