Taylor Leese has had a storied career in Silicon Valley. After completing his MS in computer science from the University of Chicago, Taylor Leese joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2009 as a computer scientist. He worked in the global security computing applications division where he wrote software to modernize security systems at U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Energy facilities.
In 2011, Taylor Leese joined StackMob as an engineer. He built back-end services to enable mobile application developers to deploy and scale their products faster. He was later promoted to engineering manager, and when PayPal acquired StackMob in 2013, Taylor Leese became PayPal’s senior manager, global platform and infrastructure. He worked at the payment company’s San Francisco office until 2015 when he left to join a social media company as a senior manager of software engineering. By 2020, he was the company’s senior director of platform services.
In 2022, Taylor Leese took on a new role at LinkedIn as senior director of Grid Storage and Streams which owned LinkedIn’s blob and data lake storage (Ambry and HDFS), messaging systems (Kafka and Northguard), and storage primitives like shard and quota management. At the company, he led a distributed team of over 100 engineers and drove LinkedIn’s migration from Kafka to Northguard.
Taylor Leese currently leads emerging venture capital firm Milos Ventures. He invests primarily in startups in AI, robotics, cleantech, energy, and defense.