LEADING THE WAY
Joan Tafoya
Meta
Joan Tafoya is the Director of Global Operations, leading a team to bring operational efficiencies to all of Meta’s datacenters, worldwide. Datacenters are the foundation for delivering Meta’s innovative services and products. She is responsible for building resilient and agile practices around capacity planning and delivery, maintenance practices, program management, and business operations leveraging operational analytics and continuous improvement methodologies.
Prior to Meta, Joan was the Director of Enterprise Excellence at Sandia National Laboratories. In her role, Joan was responsible for overseeing the design, development, and execution of the continuous improvement strategy and leading the Labs’ quality and assurance improvement strategy and implementation plans. Key responsibilities of Enterprise Excellence include introducing and championing improvement methodologies, creating and executing a framework for lean application in an R&D environment, and adapting external best practices to Sandia’s environment. Moreover, her responsibilities include ensuring quality and assurance practices occur in support of Department of Energy requirements.
Prior to joining Sandia in 2017, Joan retired from Intel Corporation after serving in a variety of roles spanning nearly 30 year. She was the Senior Director of Intel’s New Technology Group, leading manufacturing and business operations for the UAV (Drone) business. As an example of her contributions to the Drone Business unit, she was awarded Intel’s Highest Achievement award for “Game-Changing Technology and Leadership in Drone Fleet Management” in 2017. Additional experience includes Senior Director of Supply Planning Operations in the Customer Fulfillment, Planning and Logistics Group for Intel Corporation. Her responsibilities included leading Supply Planning, a team of 600 employees in 15+ countries managing all the company’s build plans for its $30B+ world-wide factory network in order to effectively provide nearly one billion units of components, boards, and systems supply to Intel customers during any given year. Joan gained further valuable experience living in Asia for nearly 8 years, completing multi-year assignments in Shanghai, China, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Penang, Malaysia. Additional assignments included extensive time in Germany and at Intel’s corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. In addition to her strong global management roles, she excelled as a technologist achieving the Senior Principal Engineer title, just below Fellow, for her contributions in Industrial and Systems Engineering.
Joan is a strong advocate of women in STEM fields. As an example of her advocacy, the Society of Women Engineers recognized Joan with the Global Leader Award in 2015, citing: “For making a lasting impact by changing paradigms for global semiconductor supply planning and for serving as a role model for women and minority engineers worldwide.” Moreover, she serves as Meta’s (and previously Sandia National Laboratories and Intel’s) liaison to the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering (IISE) Professional Society, Council of Industrial and Systems Engineering. For her outstanding contributions to her field, she is an appointed Fellow of IISE. Joan has served on the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce Board for 6 years. In 2015, Joan was recognized as a Woman of Influence by Albuquerque Business First in the technology category.
Joan holds a BS in Computer Science from Arizona State University and an MS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University, receiving a Graduate Education for Minorities (GEM) Scholarship. A native of Albuquerque, she lives with her husband of 32 years and has 2 adult children.
