Meet Jay Harrison, the Director Building NetBox Cloud's Foundations

Meet Jay Harrison, our Director of Engineering for Cloud and Foundations, based near Oxford in the UK. Jay leads two engineering teams responsible for the software and infrastructure that powers NetBox Cloud, along with the foundational engineering capabilities the rest of the organization builds on.

His day-to-day is anything but predictable. “One day I’m in a platform performance meeting discussing data usage patterns for our largest customers, the next I’m in an urgent Linear ticket at 7am trying to determine whether my teams need to take action before the school run,” Jay shares. He is hands-on as both a technical and people manager, which keeps the gap between strategy and delivery smaller than most director-level roles allow.

Three things drew Jay to NetBox Labs. “The community commitment in support of the OSS product is central to how we operate as a company, not performative,” he explains. “Second, the singularity of focus on being a great software product. We’re a technical specialist in the industry and we’re serious about being world-class at it. Thirdly, the thoughtfulness and maturity of the leadership and founder team.”

What excites him most right now is the platform’s evolution. “We’re evolving from a commercial NetBox solution into something more, an intelligent network and infrastructure platform,” Jay says. “That’s a challenging and interesting technical and product problem on its own, and it’s happening at the same time as a broader shift in AI adoption and the way the software industry operates. Two simultaneous periods of significant and exciting change.”

Ask Jay about Own It in practice and he points to the CDC event streaming platform, about six months in the making. “I was handed a situation where there had been experiments and a POC but no clear path to production,” he shares. “I hired the team to take it properly, pulled together the scattered prior work into a coherent foundation, wrote the spec from scratch covering architecture, consumer contract, delivery guarantees, and lifecycle management.” Alex and Ryan took the idea to reality. The Replica Cache is the first consumer built on it. NetBox Analytics is next.

The company’s shift to AI, Jay says, is a good example of all four values at once. “Nobody waited for a mandate. Teams started experimenting, sharing findings in channels like #club-ai, and building on each other’s work. Pragmatic tools were chosen over impressive-sounding ones. We ship when it works, not when it’s perfect.” That posture has shaped what NetBox Labs is building for customers too, from NetBox Copilot, which lets network engineers ask natural language questions about their infrastructure data, to the MCP platform work that lets customers drop their NetBox instance directly into their own AI agents and workflows.

This role, he notes, is closer to the execution than the last couple of directorial positions he has held. “At previous companies the director layer could end up fairly removed from the actual engineering work. Lots of stakeholder management, not much code. Here I’m part of the delivery, in the architecture conversations, in the incident channel, in the PR review. That’s better for the team and, honestly, more interesting for me.”

His read on life at NetBox Labs is simple. “It’s a company where you can see your work matter. The connection between what we build and what customers experience is short and direct, as guided by our values.”

Find Jay on LinkedIn to connect. Read more about our culture and check out our open roles here: netboxlabs.com/careers