Podcast profile
By David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles)
Conversations 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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51 min
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Jonathan joins Alex and David to talk about what actually changes when agents get good enough to do the work. He walks through the 60-service monorepo migration that convinced him the ceiling had moved, why "raising ambition" is now a real coaching conversation with his team, and how Block is using linters and LLM-as-j
Karla joins Alex and David from Sydney, where she's been building security-conscious AI workflows at Lorikeet--a customer service automation company where writing code by hand has officially become "artisanal." https://www.lorikeetcx.ai/ https://x.com/tetrakazi
Dylan Vassallo is an engineering manager at OpenAI leading the People Innovation Labs team — an eng, product, and design team embedded within the People org, building AI-powered tools for recruiting, HR, internal comms, and the employee experience. In this episode, Dylan talks about what it actually looks like to be an
Hosts: Alex Kessinger & David Noël-Ramos Guest: Karynn Ikeda — Former Engineering Manager → AI Enablement Program Manager at Babylist @ktikeda Karynn Ikeda shares the full arc of how Babylist adopted AI across its engineering organization — from a six-week Windsurf pilot on a single team, to company-wide Claude Code ad
Will Maier leads growth engineering at Stripe, where he's spent the last five years working across nearly every surface of the product. His background isn't CS — it's the history of science — and he's been through enough industry shifts (racking servers, the cloud transition, DevOps) to know when something really big i
After 3 years, we’re coming out of retirement, because something fundamental broke open in the last few months—something that changes everything about how we work. We Don’t Know How to Learn This Yet AI coding tools promise a 10X—maybe 100X—productivity boost. But here’s what we’re seeing: most engineers don’t know how
This 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
The 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 Techni
Often 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
Staff 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
Today 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 ma
Moving 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 r
Today’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-t
During 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 adv
Today’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 Found
Oscillating 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
Credit 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 engineerin
Today’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-
What 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 com
Please 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 inspi
Today’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 invol
Amy 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.
Today 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 testame
On 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
As 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 expla