Welcoming Kiersti Esparza, our new Deliverability Engineer

Today, we're excited to share that Kiersti Esparza is joining the team as Deliverability Engineer on the Trust & Safety Squad.

She's spent nearly 20 years making sure email actually gets where it's supposed to go, building deliverability teams at Marketo, running consulting at Twilio, and most recently working in deliverability engineering at Klaviyo. At Resend, she'll help scale sending infrastructure as we grow.

More about Kiersti

How did you get into operations?

I didn't come up through a CS degree program and a job writing code. Instead I fell into the unglamorous side of email operations and trust & safety, back when "deliverability" wasn't really a job title yet. What attracted me to the work was that it required flexible, creative thinking. Deliverability was this brand new function where the answer to every question started with "it depends," which meant you had to be curious.

It meant interpreting different datasets to understand the story they tell together, and understanding the underlying technology of email well enough to know what's happening when things go wrong. And because it's an arms race between bad actors and receivers, authentication and technology keep evolving, so there is always something new to learn. Twenty years in, I'm still excited about it!

What does your desktop/home screen look like?

My kids on a recent visit to the salt flats outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. I am going to enjoy their sibling energy and that uncluttered landscape before the desktop fills with screenshots and random downloads.

Why are you at Resend?

I've spent two decades solving deliverability problems inside legacy platforms that weren't built with developers in mind, or for the pace of change we're seeing in tech right now. Resend is doing the opposite, building sending infrastructure that's actually a joy to work with. The timing is right too because building for scale is exactly the kind of foundational, high-leverage infrastructure work I want to be doing. Getting to do it hands-on, as an individual contributor, alongside people building the whole stack from scratch, was the part I couldn't pass up.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't speak to what stood out most during the interview process - the culture. The team I talked to was earnest and clearly proud of their work, and they kept coming back to transparency and partnership. I wanted to be part of that.

Where do you find #inspiration?

For work, mostly from the deliverability community itself. I've spent years in M3AAWG mentoring people coming up in this industry, and there's something energizing about a field where everyone is quietly solving the same hard, invisible problems and still shows up to share what they've learned. Every time I get together with other people in my field, I leave refreshed and reminded why I love what I do. Community matters wherever you land.

For my personal life I live by this motto:

If you weren't operating, what would you be doing?

I have too many competing answers for this one.

Some days I think I'd be an unlicensed local tour guide in some city I love, dragging tourists away from the guidebook spots toward the tiny gallery or the restaurant with no sign out front.

Other days I think about the restaurant I'd run if I threw all logic out the window. Something small, seasonal, built entirely around whatever came out of the kitchen garden that morning, since I already spend an unreasonable amount of free time growing and preserving my own food.

I also have an art degree I've never quite let go of, so there's a version of me somewhere making a living off that instead.

And then, most unexpectedly, there's the city planner in me. I could talk for far too long about zoning, transit corridors, and why some neighborhoods just work.

I never landed on one of these, which is probably why I ended up in infrastructure instead: it's the closest thing to designing a city that nobody has to actually live in.

Favorite tool?

I should probably say something like dig in Terminal, or some other email-nerd answer, but honestly my favorite tool right now is the wood lathe. There's something so relaxing about slowly shaping something beautiful out of something raw.

Favorite hotkey?

Cmd + W

I'm notorious for leaving tabs open in my browser. I had to learn the shortcut for closing them, otherwise it's 136 tabs later and my computer grinds to a halt.

Favorite place to visit?

I love to travel and am always looking for an opportunity to explore somewhere new. I can't pick a favorite because each place is all it's own.

Advice for ambitious operators?

Learn the parts of the stack nobody's fighting over. Everyone wants to work on the visible features and the flashy launch. Almost nobody wants to own the boring infrastructure that only gets attention when it's on fire. I built an entire career by being the person willing to go deep on the unglamorous problem. That scarcity is where the leverage is. Go find the thing your team is quietly worried about and become the person who understands it best.