StaffEng
22 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 24 ratingsConversations with software engineers who have progressed beyond the career level, into Staff levels and beyond. We discuss the areas of work that set Staff-plus level engineers apart from other individual contributors; things like setting technical direction, mentorship and sponsorship, providing engineering perspective to the org, etc.Hosted by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles).
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Episodes
Alex Kessinger (Stitch Fix) and David Noël-Romas (Stripe)
December 28, 2021 15:00 - 1 hour - 46.7 MBThis episode is a celebration of the journey we have been on as this podcast comes to a close. We have had such a great time bringing you these interviews and we are excited about a new chapter, taking the lessons we have learned forward into different spaces. It's been a lot of work putting this show together, but it has also been such a pleasure doing it. And, as we all know, nothing good lasts forever! So to close the circle in a sense, we decided to host a conversation between the two of...
Peter Stout (Netflix)
December 14, 2021 15:00 - 52 minutes - 35.9 MBThe structures of an organization can often be self-reinforcing, and in a changing environment, this becomes a recipe for future vulnerabilities. That is why senior ICs need to play a slightly discordant role at times by alerting teams to issues conventionally outside of their bubble of concern. Peter Stout is a Technical Director at Netflix where he has a cross-functional role at the juncture of business and technology. He joins us on the show today to share some of the finer details around...
James Cowling (Convex)
November 30, 2021 15:00 - 48 minutes - 33.4 MBOften the biggest impacts a Staff Engineer can make in their organization are not technical but rather people-related. When teams are value-aligned due to good leadership, they go on to make larger impacts than they would otherwise have. As Senior Principal Engineer at Dropbox for almost a decade, James Cowling learned a lot about how people think and work together, and he joins us today to share some of his insights. Joining this conversation, listeners will hear about James’ experience at ...
Bryan Berg (Stripe)
November 16, 2021 15:00 - 50 minutes - 35 MBStaff engineers may not get much time to code anymore, but this does not mean problem-solving and system design is not an integral part of their day-to-day. Today’s guest is Bryan Berg, Staff Engineer at Stripe, and he joins us to talk about the nuances of his position and his unique approach to the many challenges it entails. As a Staff Engineer, Bryan acts as Tech Lead of the Traffic team, and we begin our conversation by hearing about how he landed in this role. Bryan describes the ambigu...
Ben Ilegbodu (Stitch Fix)
November 02, 2021 14:00 - 35 minutes - 24.7 MBToday we talk to Ben Ilegbodu, Principal Frontend Engineer at Stitch Fix, about how he manages to stay close to the code at a senior level. We hear how he arrived at Stitch Fix and what his first tasks were to identify the pain points in customer teams. From getting the IC's on his side to learning the importance of marketing your ideas to upper management, Ben talks us through his exciting career. He describes how he handles urgent tasks, and why it's crucial to do the important tasks first...
Ashby Winch
October 19, 2021 14:00 - 40 minutes - 27.7 MBMoving from an architect role to a product-oriented one might seem like a big leap, but there are overlaps between the two roles. Today's guest, Ashby Winch, has recently made this transition, and in today's episode, they share what this has been like. Up until recently, Ashby was an architect, with their most senior role at a large logistics operation in the U.K. Now, they have shifted to a product management job, and they are using the skills from the previous role for this new position. W...
Josh Kaderlan (Lob)
October 05, 2021 14:00 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MBToday’s guest is Josh Kaderlan, Staff Software Engineer at Lob, a direct mail and address verification API company that automates and simplifies direct mail and address verification, giving businesses greater flexibility, visibility, and accuracy of offline communications and data. There are so many different and non-traditional paths to becoming a staff engineer and, in today’s episode, you’ll hear a bit about Josh’s; starting in quality assurance, moving into development, and ultimately en...
Ben Edmunds (Wayfair)
September 21, 2021 14:00 - 43 minutes - 30.1 MBDuring today’s conversation, we speak with Ben Edmunds, Senior Staff Engineer at Wayfair. You’ll hear all about his role at Wayfair, from his day-to-day active projects and how he goes about setting OKRs to the legacy and new deploy tooling he uses, and the method he has adopted to guide engineers. Ben shares ample advice for young engineers and stresses the value of learning more than one coding language. He reveals the finer details of life at Wayfair and the tools he uses to make sure tha...
Nell Shamrell-Harrington (Microsoft)
September 07, 2021 14:00 - 42 minutes - 29.3 MBToday’s guest is a principal software engineer at Microsoft who works at the interface between external and internal elements of the organization. Nell Shamrell-Harrington works on the ClearlyDefined open source project, which tracks open source licenses across open source ecosystems, and is also part of the Rust Foundation's Board of Directors. In today’s episode, you’ll hear about the “field commander” role that Nell plays in both of these organizations, and some of the major learnings the...
Rich Lafferty (PagerDuty)
August 24, 2021 14:00 - 49 minutes - 34.3 MBOscillating between the roles of individual contributor and management has been a recurring theme on this show. Our guest today, Rich Lafferty, has some special insights into this pattern that can help anyone looking to improve their work. Rich works as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at PagerDuty and has spent many years interfacing with various departments and building projects and proposals. In our conversation with Rich, we discuss how his past roles have informed his work at PagerDuty...
Mason Jones (Credit Karma)
August 10, 2021 14:00 - 45 minutes - 31.5 MBCredit Karma is a company that helps people understand their credit. Today’s guest, Mason Jones, was brought onto the Credit Karma team to move the company from a monolith to microservices. The company has grown almost four-fold since he joined, and Mason is now a senior staff engineer whose role swings from engineering to project management to technical writing, depending on the project he is working on. Prior to working at Credit Karma, Mason was involved in a number of small start-ups, an...
Lorin Hochstein (Netflix)
July 27, 2021 14:00 - 48 minutes - 33.2 MBToday’s conversation is about resilience, and as today’s guest, Lorin Hochstein, notes; “Resilience is about the stuff that isn’t visible through the metrics.” Lorin is a senior software engineer at Netflix who is on a mission to improve the company’s engineering department through creating a culture within which peer-to-peer learning and the process of reflecting on past mistakes are foundational. Lorin is responsible for the development of a few grassroots programs at Netflix which address...
Stacey Gammon (Elastic)
July 13, 2021 14:00 - 46 minutes - 31.8 MBWhat works for a small company may not work for a large company, so what do you do when your organization experiences rapid growth, and the old way of doing things is no longer sustainable? In today’s episode, we speak with Stacey Gammon, a tech lead and Principal Software Engineer at Elastic. She has been with the company for almost five years and in that time has been able to observe firsthand the challenges that come with rapid growth in areas like scalability, communications, and project...
Will Larson (Calm)
June 29, 2021 14:00 - 48 minutes - 33.5 MBPlease note that this episode contains brief mention of suicide. Today's guest needs no introduction! Of course, they will get one anyway: Will Larson is the CTO of Calm and has worked at Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He is also an author and has written two books, one of which is on Staff Engineering and serves as the inspiration for this podcast! In our conversation with Will, we discuss one of his earliest blog posts on a catastrophic launch at Digg and why he felt it was important to write a...
Mahdi Yusuf (1Password)
June 15, 2021 14:00 - 49 minutes - 34.3 MBToday’s guest is Mahdi Yusuf, Tech Lead for the Server Architecture Team at 1Password. Our conversation is about what it means as well as what it takes to navigate the needs of the org, client, and staff in order to find the best path forward. We kick things off by hearing more about what Mahdi’s job at 1Password involves and he talks about the chief concerns and responsibilities of working on the platform code that the rest of the app is built on. Mahdi’s role specifically requires him to d...
Amy Unger (GitHub)
June 01, 2021 14:00 - 36 minutes - 24.8 MBAmy Unger, our guest on today’s show, is passionate about providing a high-quality service to the customers who use the products she is working on. Amy has a diverse skill set and an equally diverse set of tasks that she undertakes weekly for GitHub, and at the core of everything she does is her drive to provide value. Amy came into the for-profit space from the academic programming space, and she explains the different experiences she has had in these realms. We discuss what a tech lead rol...
Brian Lawler (Iterable)
May 18, 2021 14:00 - 45 minutes - 31.5 MBToday we welcome Brian Lawler, who is a Principal Engineer at Iterable! Brian has a load of experience with software architecture, having worked in the space for over 25 years, at a number of different companies and amassing a large amount of wisdom and expertise in the process. The rise of Iterable stands as a testament to the great ethos and community at the company and Brian generously shares a lot of insider info on how the teams and processes work. We get to talk about his specific role...
Matthew Bilotti (Twitter)
May 04, 2021 14:00 - 49 minutes - 33.7 MBOn today’s episode of StaffEng, we speak with the formidable Matthew Bilotti who works as a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Twitter and has been at the company for 11 years. Matthew currently leads a team that plays a critical role in user safety. Matthew has also taken on a key role when it comes to mentoring junior members at Twitter. In our conversation, Matthew talks about why he’s spent so many years at Twitter, his deep passion for teaching, and why the work his team does is invisibl...
Natalia Tepluhina (GitLab)
April 20, 2021 14:00 - 54 minutes - 37.5 MBAs today’s guest, Natalia Tepluhina walks us through her professional history and describes her experiences at GitLab. After getting to know Natalia a little better, we talk about the challenges she has faced as a staff engineer. We then get into what makes GitLab a documentation-first company. Natalia goes on to explain the inherent traits of being a documentation-first company, like practicing open-sourced work and documenting every step of your knowledge journey. As our conversation with ...
Jam Leomi (Honeycomb)
April 13, 2021 14:00 - 31 minutes - 21.9 MBToday we are joined by the inspiring Jam Leomi, who is currently the Lead Security Engineer at Honeycomb. Jam has worked in tech for over ten years, holding positions in both operations and security, and we get to hear about some important milestones in their journey thus far. Jam gives us some great insight into how things work for engineers at Honeycomb, talking about expectations and priorities, and the way they currently split their time between different parts of the job. We also discus...
Mike McQuaid (GitHub)
April 06, 2021 14:00 - 47 minutes - 32.8 MBToday we have a great guest to talk about his transition to, and current role as, a staff engineer: Mike McQuaid from GitHub! Mike is also a project leader at Homebrew, and brings a wealth of expertise and experience to the table, as well as the obvious added perspective that any engineer from the GitHub team would have. In our conversation, we get into a bit of Mike's journey up until now, the period of stepping up into the position of staff engineer, and how his time spent with open-source...
Sarah Dayan (Algolia)
March 30, 2021 14:00 - 50 minutes - 34.6 MBA promotion might be a climb up the ladder but, in actual fact, it’s a step in many directions. Today, we speak with staff plus engineer Sarah Dayan, about the many nuances of her current role at Algolia, both subtle and overt. In this episode, we find out what it takes to lead teams, advocate up and down within your organization, and why relationships are of utmost importance. Getting into the swing of things, we ask Sarah to tell us more about her background before she elaborates on the ro...