← About Jesse Robbins

My background in emergency services

I was an engineer first. I had been building ISPs and running servers since high school. I stepped away from tech to train as a firefighter and EMT. Not because I was leaving technology. I wanted to understand how people perform under pressure when lives are on the line.

The fire service teaches you that failure is inevitable. Your only choice is whether you prepare for it or get surprised by it. Incident command gives you clear roles, practiced procedures, and calm under pressure. You drill until the response is muscle memory. You don’t choose the moment. The moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.

Those principles turned out to apply directly to Internet-scale infrastructure. When I joined Amazon as Master of Disaster, I brought that discipline with me. The incident management framework I built, the GameDay practice of deliberate failure injection, the shift from blame to learning. All of it came from the fire service. I began turning Amazon into a fire department.

I served as a task force leader during Hurricane Katrina, where I saw the gap between state-of-the-art technology and state-of-the-practice in the field. The hardest, most important problems live at the boundary between what is theoretically possible and what actually works under pressure.

That experience also led to Orion Labs, the real-time AI voice platform I cofounded for frontline teams. On a fire scene, you can’t type. You can’t swipe. You need voice-first computing that works in noisy, high-pressure environments with zero margin for error.

The pattern runs through everything I have built, backed, and invested in. Building systems and teams that perform when everything is on fire. Sometimes literally.

Further reading