Rebecca Weekly, Vice President of Hardware Systems at Cloudflare, was recognized by Cloud Girls, in collaboration with the Alliance of Channel Women, as a Rising Star in the eighth annual Cloud Girls Rising “Women to Watch” awards announced in May of 2023.
The Cloud Girl Rising awards were created to honor women in the telecom and IT channel who have shown leadership and innovation in the emerging cloud space as well as to inspire more women to step forward and follow their example.
Rebecca was honored as a Trailblazer, a seasoned female technology veteran who is paving the way for her organization, customers and industry in advancing cloud and next-generation technology solutions. She is recognized as a role model and mentor to colleagues and others at work and the partner community.
Cloud Girls is pleased to share more about Rebecca in this edited excerpt from her award application.
What examples demonstrate your success at implementing or promoting cloud and next-gen technology, management principles or process?
I was named to Business Insider’s Cloudverse 100 list of builders of Web 2.0 and the next generation of the Internet in December of 2022. I’ve been a speaker at VMware Explore, CTO Advisor Summit, SONiC
Foundation Summit, and the TechArena Podcast about how Cloudflare is using hardware (accelerators, Linux-based servers leveraging x86 and ARM instruction sets, and whitebox network gear) to drive best-in-class performance and reliability. I was voted the Chairperson of Open Compute Project in 2021, and through my work there we are helping design, use, and enable mainstream delivery of the most efficient designs for scalable computing.
How have you led by example? What have you done to inspire team members around cloud and next-gen technologies?
Working at a company with a remote-first culture is challenging from an inspiration and leadership point of view. I use the forums I referenced above, and the internal and external blogs to drive clarity around the
purpose and vision. I also use data to help influence folks (whether benchmarks against other companies doing similar work, or benchmarks against internal services on how “efficient” they are with the resources they utilize relative to their revenue). I am a firm believer that people want to do the right thing, but need data in order to align on what “right” is, so my primary goal in inspiration has been to help folks see what “good” looks like through greatly increasing transparency between stakeholders.
How have you mentored other women in the channel – above, below and at your level?
I am a part of Cloudflare’s mentorship program, and women in engineering group, which allows me to help aspiring women here grow in their careers. I also obviously run the book club I mentioned above, which helps facilitate growth and learning across my peers, and the learning series, which helps me bring in best-in-class talent to our company to continue learning and inspiring at the highest levels. I am a part of Upward, and have participated in several of their events to continue networking with peers across the industry, but I would say that I have struggled to find a community of women in infrastructure (there are too few of us actually operating the hardware and working to drive systemic change), and much of my network from the previous 19 years of work experience were in the Semiconductor and OxM domain vs. in the cloud directly. Part of my application here is seeking more direct partnership/mentorship with other leaders in the cloud.
Congrats, Rebecca!!