Podcast profile
By The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)
We share the most critical perspectives, habits & examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. Join our community of software engineering leaders @ www.sfelc.com!
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49 min
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In this episode, Sergiy Nesterenko (CEO @ Quilter) joins the pod to share how he turned a personal technical challenge into his own company, even before the market caught up. He shares his unique journey from SpaceX to Quilter and addresses common eng leader / founder challenges, including taking critical feedback to s
Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder & CPO @ Graphite, reveals his journey to becoming a founder and some of the major moments from Graphite’s product development story. He dissects frameworks for determining when it’s time to quit your full-time job to pursue becoming a founder and analyzing the costs vs. benefits of that decisi
Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of Engineering @ Snowflake, joins the Engineering Leadership Community Podcast to discuss all things AI – most importantly, how Snowflake is utilizing AI internally to iterate faster with smaller, focused teams. Vivek shares how AI and lower coding costs ultimately help Snowflake implement tighte
Russ d’Sa (CEO & Co-founder @ LiveKit) joins the show to deconstruct the "Product Paradigm Shift" toward voice-driven interfaces and agent-centric UX . We dive into LiveKit’s high-stakes scaling lessons: from powering OpenAI and Character AI’s voice mode, how they navigated real time bottlenecks to hit the next level o
In this episode, Patrick discusses what it means to build an empowered career & explore creative career portfolios with Jean Hsu (VP of Engineering @ Range) and Cate Huston (author of The Engineering Leader and fractional CTO @ Twill). Both share their unique engineering leadership journeys & how they built creative ca
In this episode, we’re joined by Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup, to discuss insights from his latest book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great. Eric shares what inspired him to write the book and why we need to move beyond and redefine what true profit looks like. He sha
In this episode, Geddes Munson (SVP of Engineering @ Affirm) joins us to discuss operational / engineering excellence, scaling, and AI-native transformation! We explore Affirm’s approach to operational and engineering excellence and how a 2024 outage became a turning point in refining that focus. We deconstruct “AI ret
Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied Machine Learning @ Shopify, joins the ELC podcast to share insights on building agentic platforms at scale, like Sidekick, that must keep reliability for its users at the forefront. Andrew describes the building philosophy behind Shopify and what it means to cultivate a culture of p
Inbal Shani (CPO and Head of R&D @ Twilio) deconstructs the transformation of the R&D org at Twilio! We explore the shift from a GM-led model to a unified platform strategy and “why structure must always follow strategy.” Inbal shares her framework for moving from output-focused metrics to input goals, prioritizing “ti
Rajat Monga, CVP AI Frameworks @ Microsoft, joins the podcast to discuss his leadership and founder journey, from Google Brain / Tensorflow to inference.io and back to Microsoft. He dissects what it means to refound vs. start from scratch, the value of the open source community, and strategies for discovering what prob
Enterprise customers demand 99.9% availability, regardless of how the underlying software is built. In this episode, Murali Swaminathan (CTO @ Freshworks) discusses how enterprises actually win with AI! We explore the “Architecture of Predictability” – proactive architectural safeguards to scale “responsible AI by desi
Jon Hyman (CTO & Co-Founder @ Braze) returns to the podcast to share how he balances a mature, public-company roadmap with visionary AI innovation! We deconstruct Braze’s quantitative "Product Health" framework - a scoring system used to resolve competing prioritizations and mandate technical remediation. We also discu
We discuss what effective leadership looks like across three organizational archetypes: product-led, business-led, and design-led companies with Sebastiano Armeli (Engineering Leadership @ Meta). Drawing from his leadership journey at places like Meta, Spotify, Snap, and PayPal, Sebastiano deconstructs the situational
Live from the Vercel recording studio, Lindsey Simon (VP Engineering @ Vercel) joins us to deconstruct the evolution of management craft and career growth strategies! We dissect the practice of live all-hands demos as a tool for context, accountability and inspiration. Plus, Lindsey’s "vote with your wallet" framework
Career progression is rarely a straight line. More often, it only makes sense in hindsight. Chris Chiu (VP of Engineering, Agentforce @ Salesforce) joins us to deconstruct how to navigate these non-linear career paths! We talk about identifying the mismatch in your current role, building a personal "career thesis," how
In this episode, recorded live at the OpenAI studio, Sulman Choudhry (Head of ChatGPT @ OpenAI) pulls back the curtain on how they structure engineering teams! We talk about shifting from silos to fluid mission-driven teams, vertical vs. horizontal teams, maximizing cross-functional collaboration between research, engi
Kiren Sekar (CPO @ Samsara) joins us to deconstruct the "Innovation Engine" behind Samsara, and how this system drives real-world impact and ROI across their products. We explore Samsara’s decade-long compound product strategy and the mechanics of accelerating feedback loops in an era where the primary bottlenecks shif
Founders often delay leadership coaching until a major crisis hits, leading to significant costs in productivity, team churn, and poor decisions. In this episode, James Birchler (Technical Advisor & Executive Leadership Coach) argues that early coaching is a game-changer for a startup's success. We explore the hidden c
In our latest ELC episode, we are addressing some of the biggest challenges facing engineers today: identifying your scaling thesis, putting that thesis into practice, and addressing implementation challenges. Jaikumar Ganesh, Head of Engineering @ Anyscale, shares insights from his experience working at top tech compa
How do you transform a collection of individual tools into a cohesive, AI-powered symphony? Vineeta Puranik (CPTO @ SmartBear) dissects the strategy behind evolving a product vision from point solutions to a unified multi-product ecosystem. We explore the critical architectural distinction between "AI bolt-on" and "AI
Tyson Singer (Head of Tech & Platforms @ Spotify) joins us to unpack how Spotify is transforming its product development lifecycle across creation, experimentation and maintenance to shift from "localized speed" to "systematic speed." We explore why the industry’s current obsession with the "Build It" phase of developm
It started with a simple idea from James Tyack: “What if we hosted a hackathon at ELC Annual?” The result was a unique experiment where 14 senior engineering leaders stepped away from strategy to build and ship functioning apps in one weekend, unlocking new insights on AI-native workflows, "vibe coding," and the future
This is a special episode, highlighting a session from ELC Annual 2025! Bill Coughran (Partner @ Sequoia Capital & former SVP of Engineering @ Google) and Bret Reckard (Talent Partner @ The General Partnership) deconstruct the evolving role of engineering leadership in an era dominated by AI hype. Bill is a legendary l
This is a special episode, highlighting a session from ELC Annual 2025! OpenAI evolved from a pure research lab into the fastest-growing product in history, scaling from 100 million to 700 million weekly users in record time. In this episode, we deconstruct the organizational design choices and cultural bets that enabl
In this episode, Brian Balfour (Founder & CEO @ Reforge) deconstructs the two core, interconnected challenges leaders face in the AI age: deciding what to build and evolving the Engineering, Product, Design workflow to deliver it. We cover why you should avoid “the local maxima trap” and siphon off "skunkworks" teams t