The Builder's Builder
Raylene Yung is not interested in the org chart as a symbol of authority. She's interested in it as a machine - one that can be tuned, repaired, and redesigned to move faster, stay sane, and survive contact with reality. That perspective, developed over a decade of scaling teams through moments that would break lesser managers, is what makes her a singular voice in engineering leadership.
She holds both a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford, with a focus on Theoretical CS and AI. She got ahead of the AI wave before it became fashionable to say so. But Yung chose to apply her mind not to models, but to the harder problem: getting smart, opinionated engineers to build great things together.
Facebook: The Making of a Director
In 2009, fresh from Stanford, Yung made a decision that reveals everything about how she thinks. She had a Manhattan hedge fund offer on the table. She turned it down for Facebook, reasoning it would teach her more about engineering fundamentals. The bet paid off in ways that compounded for years.
At Facebook, she moved through roles on some of the highest-traffic systems ever built - News Feed, Timeline, Privacy, Content Creation, Sharing. These were not feature teams. They were the load-bearing walls of a social network serving hundreds of millions. By the time she left in 2015, she had become the youngest engineering director at any public company with more than 10,000 employees. She got there by understanding that technical excellence and organizational clarity are not separate disciplines.
During Facebook's hypergrowth period, she helped scale engineering from roughly 700 to over 10,000 people. That's not a headcount exercise. That's cultural engineering at a scale most people never encounter. She watched what worked, what broke, what needed to be rebuilt - and she took notes.
Stripe: The Architect's Second Act
Stripe in 2015 was not the institutional behemoth it would become. It was a fast-moving, developer-obsessed payments company that needed someone who could build the organizational infrastructure to match its ambitions. Yung joined as Head of Payments and Product Engineering.
In four years, she built things that didn't exist: Stripe's first Product Management team, engineering levels and ladders that gave people a visible path forward, and an engineering hub in Singapore that planted the company's flag in Asia-Pacific. When she arrived, there were roughly 200 engineers. When she left, there were over 1,500.
The Singapore chapter deserves its own paragraph. Moving from San Francisco to Singapore to build a regional hub meant learning a different tech ecosystem - one where Silicon Valley's weekly engineering meetup culture simply didn't exist. She saw this not as a problem but, characteristically, as an "arbitrage opportunity" for engineering management education. The same systems thinking, applied to a new geography.
When she left Stripe, she didn't keep her playbook private. She published the Engineering Handbook as an open-source GitHub repository - templates for one-on-ones, manager transitions, performance reviews. Knowledge that most organizations treat as proprietary, she handed to anyone who wanted it. That instinct says a lot.
The Pivot No One Saw Coming
In 2020, a global pandemic arrived and Yung did something she later described as "unthinkable" to her earlier self. She co-founded U.S. Digital Response - a nonpartisan nonprofit that connects technologists with governments struggling to deliver services in a crisis.
USDR mobilized 10,000+ volunteers across 550+ projects in all 50 states and territories. Think about that operational achievement for a moment. She built Stripe's PM team and Singapore office. Now she was building an emergency civil infrastructure organization from scratch, in real time, during a pandemic. Same skills. Different stakes.
The Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub took notice. She became a Fellow, working on a project examining how investors can understand the environmental impact of cloud computing. This was not a gap year. This was Yung discovering that the line between technology decisions and public-sector impact is thinner than most engineers believe.
Washington: Running a Billion-Dollar Fund
In 2021, the U.S. General Services Administration named her Executive Director of the Technology Modernization Fund Program Office. The TMF invests in federal agencies' technology modernization efforts. During her tenure through 2023, she oversaw more than $1 billion in investments - money meant to drag federal systems out of the mainframe era and into something a citizen might actually trust.
Government technology moves at the speed of procurement, not the speed of Stripe. The constraints are different. The accountability is different. The politics are real. Yung navigated all of it with the same toolkit: clear process, visible structures, and an eye for what compounds over time.
From GSA, she moved to the Department of Energy as Chief of Staff for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations - the division responsible for deploying clean energy technologies at scale. Org design for the energy transition. Still the same discipline.
Now: Field Notes and Board Seats
Today, Yung serves on the boards of U.S. Digital Response - the organization she co-founded - and SolarAPP+, which streamlines solar permitting to accelerate deployment. She writes raylene's field notes on Substack, a newsletter at the intersection of climate, tech, and systems thinking. The tagline could be: "same brain, new problems."
Her Twitter handle, @emdashry, is itself a small joke: em dash plus her initial. A writer's punctuation mark worn as an identifier by someone who spent years scaling engineering orgs. The self-awareness in that choice is entirely consistent with someone who publishes their management templates for free and writes about organizational design with the directness of someone who has had to make hard decisions in real time.
What's the throughline? Yung builds things that help other people build better. Engineering handbooks, nonprofit infrastructure, federal investment portfolios, regional engineering hubs. The form changes. The function doesn't.