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Profile
Tina Cessna is the SVP of Engineering of Backblaze Cloud Storage. She first joined the company in 2018 as VP of engineering. Backblaze provides cloud storage and online backup that’s astonishingly easy to use and affordable.
Previously, Cessna was a senior director of software development at Oracle and before that a software engineering manager at Belkin. Earlier in her career she worked with Cisco Systems as a senior software engineer.
Cessna earned an undergraduate degree in electronic and computer engineering from California State Polytechnic University – Pomona.
Tina has grown and evolved the engineering organization, adding healthy levels of structure and process. She has been proactive in planning for potential issues (e.g. succession planning) and active in addressing existing ones. She makes commitments and feels accountable for them. Her team has delivered on numerous critical projects throughout the year. She has actively worked to support the engineering team (especially during the pandemic) on a mental health level, including asking real “how are you feeling” questions, bringing in fun items such as our first Hackathon, protecting her team’s time off, being on a Women Empower Women panel, and more. She has also worked across the company with TechOps, Finance, Marketing, etc. to support various needs including storage upgrades, audit support, website redesign, etc. This year, she has also taken a more “I can own that” approach to items that cross functions, which is a great leadership trait. She thinks about the high-level company needs, while managing all the details. She cares about the company and its success, the people and culture, and doing a good job herself.