Senior Executive Business Partner to the CEO and the CTO at Twitch. One inbox, two principals, a city's worth of decisions per week.
The org chart will tell you Susan supports two executives. The day-to-day will tell you the executives move at the speed she clears the runway.
Twitch streams roughly 24 million hours of live video a day. Somebody has to schedule the people deciding what happens to all of it.
Walk into Twitch's San Francisco headquarters at 350 Bush Street and you will not see Susan Cubillos on a marketing poster. You will not see her quoted in the press release announcing the next big creator deal, or the next infrastructure rebuild, or the next round of difficult decisions at a company that has spent a decade being both ubiquitous and unprofitable. What you will see, if you look closely, is the apparatus that makes those announcements possible at all.
Her title is Senior Executive Business Partner to the CEO and the CTO. Strip out the corporate Latin and what's left is a single person carrying two of the most contested calendars in interactive video. The CEO's day is mostly external - investors, partners, regulators, the parent company in Seattle. The CTO's day is mostly internal - architecture reviews, on-call escalations, the people who keep a live video platform from collapsing into a buffering wheel. Susan stands between those two timelines and decides which one wins the next thirty minutes.
This is, on the surface, an administrative job. In practice, it is something closer to air traffic control with discretion. The half-hour she gives away cannot be returned. The meeting she lets run long bumps a decision that was due before lunch. The person she sends to someone else's office instead of her principal's gets either solved or stalled, and neither outcome shows up in a metrics deck.
You can describe her role in three numbers and still miss it. Twitch has roughly 1,100 employees. The parent company, Amazon, paid $970 million for it in 2014, an acquisition that has aged into something closer to a strategic foothold than a line item. The platform now generates somewhere around $1.7 billion in annual revenue. Every dollar of that flows through decisions made by people whose time Susan is responsible for protecting.
The work is invisible by design. Executive Business Partners who do the job well are never the story. They are the reason the story arrives on time. They are the reason the all-hands starts at 10:00 and not 10:14. They are the reason a senior engineer who has been trying for two weeks to get five minutes with the CTO finally gets it - or, more often, the reason that engineer gets routed to the person who can actually help, which is rarely the CTO.
It would be tidy to call Susan a gatekeeper. It would also be wrong. Gatekeepers say no. Operators of her grade say not yet, not here, not them, and then they tell you who and when and where, and the thing moves.
Calendars are a form of leadership. Whoever owns the schedule owns the priorities.- the unwritten rule of the EBP desk
External-facing: parent-company alignment with Amazon, talent strategy at the creator end of the platform, the long meetings about culture that don't end with action items but matter anyway. Susan choreographs the prep, the post-mortem, and the half-hour buffer everyone forgets to ask for.
Internal-facing: a stack that runs on AWS - Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Step Functions - with a sprinkling of Fastly and Akamai for the edge. The CTO doesn't need a calendar; the CTO needs a triage nurse. Susan plays both.
When the CEO needs the CTO and the CTO needs forty uninterrupted minutes, the conflict lands on one desk. That desk is Susan's. Most days, the result looks like a decision. On rougher days, it looks like a defended hour.
Twitch is, by any reasonable accounting, one of the strangest companies in technology. It was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly a billion dollars, which made it both an early bet on interactive entertainment and a permanent question mark on Amazon's earnings calls. The number of people who use it daily is enormous. The number of people who understand exactly what it is - a video platform, a chat platform, a payment rail for creators, a town square for a generation that didn't grow up with cable - is much smaller.
The company sits at 350 Bush Street in downtown San Francisco. The phone number is on the website. The headcount hovers near 1,100. The technology stack reads like a tour of the modern web: React, TypeScript, Go, Python, Kotlin on the Android side, Spark and Redshift on the data side, Salesforce and ServiceNow on the operational side, Slack everywhere. Susan's desk touches none of these tools directly and all of them indirectly. Every system listed above is, somewhere down the line, owned by someone whose access to the CTO she helps mediate.
What makes the role distinctive isn't the company; it's the dual-principal arrangement. Most senior EBPs support a single executive. Susan supports two, and they're the two whose work points in opposite directions. The CEO faces out. The CTO faces in. The center of that compass is one chair, and somebody has to sit in it.
The category of person who can do this work is small. It requires the kind of memory that catches a name on its second mention, three weeks apart. It requires the social fluency to tell a senior engineer that the meeting they want isn't the meeting they need, and to do it in a way that doesn't bruise. It requires the operational discipline to keep two Slack threads, three calendars, and one travel itinerary internally consistent through a week that includes a board prep, an incident review, and a creator visit. And it requires the discretion to never, under any circumstance, be the source of the story.
Most public-facing technology coverage treats people in Susan's position as background scenery. The org charts on Comparably and The Org list executives by name and bury the operators who keep the executives functional. The Twitch leadership listings highlight the CEO, the CTO, the heads of product, content, engineering. They do not list the EBPs. This is fair, in the way that crediting the conductor without crediting the orchestra is fair - it is also incomplete.
The honest description of Susan's job is that she is part of the company's central nervous system. Information flows up to her, sideways through her, and down from her, in ratios that change by the hour. She is not the decision-maker. She is the architecture that makes the decisions land on the right desk.
Downtown San Francisco, walking distance from the Embarcadero, a few blocks from the financial district. Twitch sits on the seam between the city's old money and its new noise. The lobby is the easy part. The calendar inside is not.
Amazon paid $970M for Twitch in August 2014. The deal looked rich at the time. A decade on, it looks like the moment Amazon learned what live video was for. Susan's job exists inside the second-order effects.
Supporting one executive is a full-time job. Supporting two is a job that requires either a second brain or a very organized first one. The role is rare for a reason.
Susan doesn't write code, but every system below touches a person whose time she manages. Reading the stack is reading the meeting load.
It is tempting, in a profile like this, to reach for the heroic register - to claim that the EBP secretly runs the company, that the executives would crumble without her, that the calendar is the real strategy. None of that is quite right. The executives run the company. The strategy is the strategy. The calendar is the medium through which the strategy reaches the building.
What is true is that the job rewards a particular kind of mind. The kind that holds context across weeks instead of hours. The kind that remembers who asked for what, when, and in what tone. The kind that can read a room from a Slack thread. The kind that knows the difference between a question that needs an answer and a question that needs a meeting and a question that needs to be quietly retired.
Susan's public footprint is small on purpose. The LinkedIn profile is there. The Twitch directory lists the executives she supports. There are no podcast episodes, no keynote panels, no Substack newsletter, no public hot takes on the future of live streaming. The absence is the point. People at her grade who become the story have, by definition, stopped doing the job.
If you want to understand how a company like Twitch actually works, the CEO interviews will only get you so far. The product launches will only get you so far. Look instead at the seams - the schedules, the introductions, the meetings that didn't happen because somebody decided they shouldn't, the meetings that did happen because somebody decided they should. That is where Susan Cubillos works. That is where most of the leverage actually lives.