StaffEng

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 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. We...

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 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 that...

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 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 ...

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-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 ...

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 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 ab...

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. 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 role...

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 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 invisible...

Today 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 discuss...