Tech Teams Today

Bhavin Surela leads large-scale messaging engineering at Twilio, where his teams handle WhatsApp, RCS, and OTT channels at a scale of billions of interactions a day. Some of those messages are OTP flows, ambulance dispatches, and banking transactions, so fast, reliable, and trustworthy aren't nice-to-haves.Bhavin and Josh get into why operational discipline matters more in the AI era, not less. His framing: AI is a magnifying glass. If you already have good rigor, you're shipping faster. If you didn't, you're hitting walls. They cover how Twilio keeps innovation decentralized while keeping technology choices tight (so teams move fast without tech sprawl), why judgment and subject matter expertise are becoming the scarce commodity, and where Bhavin lands on the "team of one plus agents" prediction (spoiler: he's not buying it yet).They close on something every remote leader is wrestling with: how do you keep people actually talking to each other when it's easier to just ask the AI?About Our Guest:Bhavin Surela leads large-scale messaging engineering at Twilio, running a fully remote org of engineers organized around business outcomes: onboarding, message delivery, and content management across WhatsApp, RCS, and other channels. His teams operate end-to-end, full-stack, at a scale of billions of interactions a day, where reliability is non-negotiable. He's spent years investing in operational discipline at scale, and he's a clear-eyed voice on what AI does and doesn't change about that work.About Tech Teams Today:Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.Subscribe and never miss an episode:- YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@revelohq⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Spotify: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ymzd0MC1YjnFy7hKzzR9x?si=51f3989aa4bc4308⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-teams-today/id1641545336⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect with us:- Revelo: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.revelo.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Josh Anderson (Field CTO): ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadavidanderson/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Revelo on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelohq/⁠⁠

Every engineering leader is being told AI changed everything. But what actually changed?Josh Anderson sits down with Josh Holat, CTO of Cube, to draw a line between two things that have quietly gotten conflated: coding and engineering. The tools moved fast. The job didn't. Code review is the new bottleneck. Tests still have to pass. Your name is still on the commit, even when an LLM wrote half of it.They get into AI slop in pull requests, why "senior software engineer" became something not to put in a cover letter, how Cube interviews now that take-homes are dead, the shift to smaller teams and what's replacing agile, token budgets without theater, and the JSON test harness that lets a 20-person FP&A engineering team ship with confidence in a domain where rounding errors end careers.About Our Guest:Josh Holat is the CTO of Cube, a spreadsheet-native FP&A platform used by finance teams to plan, model, and report without leaving Excel or Google Sheets. He's been building and scaling engineering teams for over 15 years, including a prior co-founder role that ended in acquisition. At Cube, he leads engineering, architecture, and the company's AI strategy, with a particular focus on shipping reliable systems in a domain (finance) where being wrong has hard, immediate consequences.About Tech Teams Today:Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.Subscribe and never miss an episode:- YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@revelohq⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Spotify: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ymzd0MC1YjnFy7hKzzR9x?si=51f3989aa4bc4308⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-teams-today/id1641545336⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect with us:- Revelo: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.revelo.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Josh Anderson (Field CTO): ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadavidanderson/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Revelo on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelohq/⁠

Josh sits down with Siva Jagadeesan, VP of Product, Engineering, and Optimization at Yahoo, where he leads the monetization group behind advertising across all Yahoo properties. Siva still writes code because he loves it, but his real conviction lives in how engineering leaders should be operating right now: not as the smartest person in the room, but as the architect of conditions where the smartest answer surfaces, wherever it comes from.What you'll learn:Why the "movie general" model of leadership stops working the moment your domain gets complex, and what actually replaces itHow to build a real bench by delegating authority instead of tasks (and why your bench is the actual ceiling on your scope)How to engineer psychological safety into your team's process instead of trying to talk it into existenceWhy combining product and engineering creates "organizational liquidity," and why that matters more than just faster decisionsHow to read AI's productivity gains honestly: where it's actually moving the bottleneck, and where it isn'tWhy the future two-person team isn't shrinking. It's capability expansion, and that changes how you staffThe mindset shift that separates leaders whose teams thrive in this moment from leaders whose teams freezeAbout the guest:Siva Jagadeesan is VP of Product, Engineering, and Yield Optimization at Yahoo, where he leads ad monetization across all Yahoo consumer properties, including Mail, News, Finance, Sports, and more. He owns the full picture: product strategy, engineering execution, and revenue optimization.A software engineer at heart who still codes today, Siva has spent 20+ years building technology for Fortune 500 companies and startups. He was a founding member of Amazon Publisher Services, helped build the ML engineering team at TubeMogul, and co-founded the engineering function at Runa, an early-stage SaaS startup using predictive modeling to personalize offers in real time. Before any of that, he spent seven-plus years at ThoughtWorks, where mentoring future engineers was the moment he realized leadership was where he wanted to build his career.His north star is non-linear scalability, the belief that aligning technology, culture, and process is how great teams multiply their impact.About Tech Teams Today:Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.Subscribe and never miss an episode:- YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@revelohq⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Spotify: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ymzd0MC1YjnFy7hKzzR9x?si=51f3989aa4bc4308⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-teams-today/id1641545336⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect with us:- Revelo: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.revelo.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Josh Anderson (Field CTO): ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadavidanderson/⁠⁠⁠- Revelo on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelohq/⁠

Jonathan Klein is the CTO and COO at KOHO, a Canadian fintech company, which means shipping AI slop into production is simply not an option. He's also someone who grew an engineering org from 20 to 600 people at Wayfair, then deliberately chose to go smaller again to get back closer to the work. Jonathan has a take on token capping that he's happy to defend.What you'll learn:Why KOHO moved to a full-stack model and how Figma Code Connect is changing what front-end development even meansHow AI is shrinking the atomic unit of a team from six devs to four — and where those people are goingWhy judgment and architectural taste are now the scarcest skills on any engineering team, now that code itself is cheap to produceThe "swarm of code reviewers": specialized AI agents reviewing security, maintainability, and architecture separately before a human ever looks at the PRWhy he requires candidates to use AI in interviews and designs problems hard enough that they have toThe hype anxiety problem — why people feel like they need an agent running 24/7, and how to give your team permission to shut it downHis contrarian take: if your developer goes from 1.5x ROI to 10x ROI, the answer is to hire more, not fewerThe insight from The Power of Full Engagement he keeps coming back to: the fundamental currency of productivity is energy, not timeAbout the guest:Jonathan Klein is the CTO and COO at KOHO, a Canadian fintech company reimagining banking for Canadians. With a career spanning Wayfair (twice), Etsy, and multiple early-stage startups, Jonathan has led engineering organizations from a team of five to a team of 600 and brings a rare combination of deep technical credibility and organizational leadership experience.About Tech Teams Today:Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.Subscribe and never miss an episode:- YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@revelohq⁠⁠⁠- Spotify: ⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ymzd0MC1YjnFy7hKzzR9x?si=51f3989aa4bc4308⁠⁠⁠- Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-teams-today/id1641545336⁠⁠⁠Connect with us:- Revelo: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.revelo.com⁠⁠⁠- Josh Anderson (Field CTO): ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadavidanderson/⁠- Revelo on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelohq/⁠

Alicia Davis is the SVP of Engineering and Development Operations at Solera — a global enterprise operating at scale in vehicle lifecycle management — and she has takes that you won't hear from most engineering leaders. She loves reorgs. She thinks AI is going to put your agile team "on Ozempic." And she'll tell you flat out: you're not interviewing to find the best candidate. You're interviewing to filter out the ones who will do damage.This is a packed conversation on what it actually takes to lead engineering orgs through constant change — and what most leaders are getting dangerously wrong about AI adoption right now.What you'll learn:Why Alicia loves reorgs — and why she thinks AI will make them more frequent across every orgThe "two pizza team on Ozempic" theory: how AI shrinks team size while massively expanding capacityHow the job of an engineer is flipping from 80% coding / 20% decisions to the exact reverseWhy she's seeing candidates show up to interviews with AI assistants live on the call — and how she's adapted her processThe Taco Bell cautionary tale: what happens when you rush AI into production without guardrailsWhy "good brakes make the car go faster" — and how that Agile principle applies to AI adoption right nowWhat the trust gap in AI actually requires to close (hint: it's the same fundamentals as always)The contrarian hiring take: you're not interviewing for the best candidate, you're interviewing to exclude the harmful onesWhat the next generation of engineering leaders needs to do to stay ahead of disruptionAbout the guest:Alicia Davis is SVP of Engineering and Development Operations at Solera, the global leader in vehicle lifecycle management SaaS, data, and services. With deep experience leading large-scale engineering organizations through multiple technology hype cycles — cloud, DevOps, Kubernetes, and now AI — Alicia brings a pattern-recognition perspective on change that most leaders are still catching up to.About Tech Teams Today:Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.Subscribe and never miss an episode:- YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@revelohq⁠- Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ymzd0MC1YjnFy7hKzzR9x?si=51f3989aa4bc4308⁠- Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-teams-today/id1641545336⁠Connect with us:- Revelo: ⁠https://www.revelo.com⁠- Lucas Mendes (CEO): ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmzmendes/⁠- Revelo on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelohq/⁠

What happens when a CTO brings Silicon Valley-level engineering leadership to one of America's most iconic nonprofits? Travis Gibson, CTO at Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, leads a team of 35 across internal staff and staff augmentation, and he's rethinking what it means to build high-performing tech teams. In this episode, he challenges some of the biggest assumptions in engineering leadership today.**What you'll learn:**- Why the fastest coder on your team probably isn't your best engineer, and what actually makes someone great- How AI is reshaping the CTO role beyond just being another tool in the stack- Why remote work isn't a compromise but a genuine cheat code for deep, focused engineering work- What it takes to lead a blended team of internal engineers and staff augmentation effectively- How engineering leadership at a mission-driven nonprofit differs from (and often outperforms) traditional tech companies- The leadership principles that help technical teams stay aligned when they're not in the same room**About the guest:**Travis Gibson is the Chief Technology Officer at Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the nation's largest and most experienced youth mentoring organization. He leads a technology organization of 15 internal staff and 20 staff augmentation professionals, driving digital transformation for an organization that serves communities across the country. Travis brings a thoughtful, people-first approach to engineering leadership that challenges conventional wisdom about speed, talent, and how great teams actually work.**About Tech Teams Today:**Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.Subscribe and never miss an episode:Connect with us:Revelo: https://www.revelo.comLucas Mendes (CEO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmzmendes/Revelo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelohq/#EngineeringLeadership #CTO #Nonprofit #TechTeams #RemoteWork #AILeadership #StaffAugmentation #DeepWork #TechTeamsToday #BigBrothersBigSisters

What happens when AI changes not only how engineers work — but how they’re hired, evaluated, and led?In this episode, Derek Knudsen, Chief Delivery Officer and Head of Engineering at Revenue.io, shares a clear, grounded view on the future of engineering teams: how to keep velocity high with smaller, surgical teams, how to navigate the explosion of hiring fraud, how to measure real ROI from AI tools, and why he believes AI represents an intellectual extinction event for companies that don’t adapt.If you lead engineers, this conversation will hit close to home.⸻What you’ll learn– Team Design: Why Revenue.io runs “small and mighty” podsLess headcount, more impact: the counterintuitive math behind smaller, deeply aligned teams.– Remote Work: Why they stayed remote even as others push RTOAnd how they collaborate across fully distributed teams with intentional in-person strategy sessions.– Hiring in 2025: How they screen for behavior, not buzzwordsWhy they shifted from skill-first hiring to attribute-first hiring — and how that improved outcomes.– Fraud in hiring: 7,000 applicants for one job & a near-miss fraud caseDeepfakes, fake paystubs, stolen identities — and what Derek learned the hard way.– AI ROI: How they measure productivity per engineerVelocity, opportunity cost, and what “2 FTE per FTE” looks like with agentic workflows.– The learning curve: Why leaders must create space to experimentAI doesn’t magically increase output; it requires dedicated time to climb the curve.– Leadership today: Empathy + modeling behavior during uncertaintyWhy leaders must “show their work” with AI to reduce fear and increase adoption.– Contrarian take:AI isn’t another wave — it’s an extinction event for individuals and organizations that don’t adapt quickly.⸻About our guestDerek Knudsen is Chief Delivery Officer and Head of Engineering at Revenue.io, where he leads distributed engineering teams focused on platform modernization, AI adoption, hiring excellence, and strategic delivery.About the showTech Teams Today is hosted by Lucas Mendes, CEO & Co-founder of Revelo — helping companies hire elite, time-zone-aligned engineers from Latin America. New episodes weekly.

When a company doubles overnight, leadership gets real.Ryan Mitchell, VP of Engineering at WOW! Internet, TV & Phone, shares the playbook for leading through mergers, culture clashes, and impossible deadlines—without losing your team’s trust or your sanity.SummaryIn this episode, Ryan Mitchell, VP of Network Products and Service Engineering at WOW, shares insights from his extensive career in technology leadership. He discusses the importance of understanding one's value system, the challenges of leading teams through mergers, and the significance of emotional intelligence in management. Ryan also delves into the transition to agile methodologies, the journey towards becoming a data-driven organization, and the balance between reliability and innovation in the telecom industry. He emphasizes the role of AI in future network innovations and offers advice for engineers aspiring to leadership roles.TakeawaysUnderstanding your value system is crucial for leadership.Switching roles can provide growth opportunities.Letting your work speak for itself is important, but self-promotion is necessary.Time and patience are essential in driving change during mergers.Emotional intelligence is key in motivating teams, especially in hybrid settings.Transitioning to agile requires overcoming resistance and fostering transparency.Building a data-driven organization starts with improving data quality.Balancing reliability and innovation is a challenge in telecom.Security and compliance are critical in managing hybrid cloud environments.AI presents significant opportunities for innovation in the telecom industry.Chapters00:00 Navigating a Long Career in Tech Leadership02:56 Leadership Principles and Rethinking Approaches05:56 Driving Change: Mergers and Cultural Integration08:47 Emotional Intelligence in Team Management11:47 Transitioning to Agile Methodologies14:23 Building a Data-Driven Organization17:23 Balancing Reliability and Innovation in Telecom20:29 The Hybrid Cloud Journey and Cost Management23:35 Future of Engineering: AI and Talent Development29:25 Opportunities in Network Innovation and Leadership Advice

Reliability Beats “Cutting Edge” — Scaling Healthcare Engineering w/ Paul Cannon, CTO @ Healthcare IT LeadersWhat does engineering leadership look like when uptime matters more than hype?In this episode, Paul Cannon (CTO, Healthcare IT Leaders) breaks down how he’s scaling a high-growth services org supporting EHR and ERP platforms (Epic, Oracle/Cerner, Workday, UKG)—and why reliability often beats “cutting edge” in healthcare.We cover building a Kansas City Center of Excellence, hiring senior-heavy teams at speed, AI’s impact on interviews and code quality, and why transparency matters more in hybrid organizations.What you’ll learnBuilding a services engine: from staff augmentation to “continuous services” with a tech layer on topReliability beats novelty: why customers reward stability over bleeding edge techHiring at pace: networks, senior talent density, and when to introduce junior devsAI in the funnel: separating signal from noise when candidates use AI on take-homesTrust and AI: where copilots help (tests, docs) and where human judgment stays criticalLeadership shifts: transparency in hybrid teams and the IC→leader transitionKey takeawaysStability wins in regulated, mission-critical environmentsSpeed and quality can coexist—if you set standards and shorten the “prove it” loopEvaluate fundamentals, not just output—AI can mask real gapsTrain for smart AI use; don’t outsource understandingHiring strategy evolves: start senior-heavy, then layer in juniors with intentAbout our guestPaul Cannon is CTO at Healthcare IT Leaders, where he leads engineering for managed/continuous services across major EHR and ERP ecosystems.About the showTech Teams Today is hosted by Lucas Mendes, CEO & Co-founder of Revelo—helping companies build elite engineering teams and improve AI systems with expert data. New episodes weekly.

Tech Teams Today: Rethinking Engineering Leadership in the AI Era w/ Susan Reilly (VP Eng, Checkatrade)AI isn't an arms race - it's a tool belt. In this episode, Susan Reilly shares how she's deploying AI across a 100-person org, why "don't reinvent the wheel" no longer fits 2025, and how simple rituals like Async Fridays and Innovation Week can unlock both velocity and trust.What you'll learnAI as a tool belt: How leaders should pick the right tool for the job - and teach teams to guide, not blindly accept, AI output.Rollout that actually works: Where AI saves real time (tests, bug hunts, doc review) and where human judgment must stay in the loop.Hiring in 2025: Why adaptability and curiosity have eclipsed "I'm a X-stack dev," and how Susan assesses true technical depth.Culture that scales: The surprising productivity gains from meeting-free Fridays and why rituals matter more in hybrid orgs.Two contrarian takes: Retire "don't reinvent the wheel," and stop making big decisions behind closed doors.Mentorship beats management: Practical ways to build empathetic teams that ship better software.Key takeawaysYou get what you put in. AI accelerates grunt work, but only if engineers learn to prompt, critique, and iterate on results.Adaptability beats narrow labels. Hire for boldness, curiosity, and collaboration; stacks change, fundamentals don't.Rituals create flexibility. Clear communication and consistent ceremonies enable fewer meetings and more deep work.Experiment time isn't a perk - it's required. Create space to play with new tools or teams will "adopt" nothing.Reinvent selectively. In fast-moving domains like AI, clinging to "the old wheel" is riskier than rethinking it.About our guestSusan Reilly is VP of Engineering at Checkatrade. She's led distributed teams across the UK and Ireland and writes about pragmatic engineering leadership in the age of AI. Best place to connect: LinkedIn (search "Susan Reilly Checkatrade").About the showTech Teams Today is hosted by Lucas Mendes, CEO & Co-founder of Revelo - helping companies build elite engineering teams and improve AI-generated code with expert data. New episodes weekly.AskIf this helped you lead better:Subscribe for more conversations with hands-on leaders.Comment: What's one AI workflow your team won't give up?Share with a peer who's rolling out AI across their org.Keywordsengineering leadership, AI in software engineering, developer productivity, GitHub Copilot, hybrid teams, async work, mentorship, team rituals, system design interviews, innovation week, meeting-free Fridays, leadership mantras, hiring engineers 2025, tool belt not arms race

In this episode of Tech Teams Today, host Matthieu McClintock welcomes Nan Guo, SVP of Engineering at Zendesk, for a wide-ranging discussion on building high-performing engineering organizations in the era of AI.Nan shares hard-won lessons from leading teams through hypergrowth and global transformation—covering everything from operationalizing AI infrastructure to building trust across time zones. She opens up about her leadership philosophy, including why psychological safety and a blameless culture are non-negotiables at Zendesk.Listeners will also hear how Zendesk approaches AI model redundancy, why trust isn’t a feature but a foundation, and how engineering metrics must evolve to reflect modern development realities. Nan gets candid about the rise of AI coding tools, the risks of “vibe coding,” and what she looks for in engineering hires today.Whether you're navigating distributed teams, hiring in a post-Copilot world, or scaling AI-powered products, this episode delivers both inspiration and tactical insight.Subscribe to Tech Teams Today on all major podcast platforms for weekly conversations with engineering leaders redefining what great teams look like in 2025 and beyond.

From challenging the value of junior dev roles to redefining what hiring really means, Gene Linetsky (CTO of Embroker) brings a contrarian perspective to engineering leadership.In this episode of Tech Teams Today, host Matt McClintock and Gene Linetsky dive into:Why hiring is more about filtering out the wrong candidates than finding the “perfect” oneHow AI copilots may reshape the developer pipelineThe difference between a CTO and VP of EngineeringScaling teams without losing velocityBuilding culture in regulated industriesNavigating mergers and acquisitionsThe underrated qualities that make a hire transformationalIf you’re looking for straight talk, sharp insights, and a different way to think about leadership in engineering, this episode delivers.Subscribe to Tech Teams Today now for weekly conversations with top tech leaders.

Kazuki Nishiura’s engineering journey has spanned the polished halls of Google, the breakneck scaling of Bolt, and the unpredictable world of startups. Now CTO of an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform, he’s rethinking how teams hire, scale, and build in the AI era.In this conversation on Tech Teams Today, Kazuki shares:Why his interviews let candidates use their own laptop, IDE, and AI modelThe one thing you can’t compromise on when scaling teamsHow AI is transforming fraud detection, compliance, and engineering workflowsThe lessons he carried from big tech to hypergrowth to startup leadershipWhether you’re an engineering leader, a developer, or just curious about how AI is reshaping tech teams, this episode is packed with practical insights.Listen now and subscribe to Tech Teams Today for more conversations with engineering leaders redefining the future of software.Want to learn more about what Kazuki is working on? Check out www.sardine.ai for more.