Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers and Leaders
Location: San Francisco, CA
Current Role: Engineering Manager
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I was a software engineer for many years and it got to the point where I wanted to expand my skill set outside of technical capabilities. Growing teams and interest to me, so while at Dropbox I became involved with the summer internship program.
Running the internship program brought on a whole new set of challenges that weren’t in my comfort zone,
Location: San Francisco, CA
Current Role: SVP of Engineering at Kindred.ai
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I did my Ph.D. in Computer Networking and joined Bell Labs. After a few years, I realized that I have a lot of passion for building products. This took me to Bay Area. Becoming a manager was quite organic. I proposed a project and was soon leading a team of engineers as a Tech Lead.
Location: San Francisco
Current Role: Senior Director, Software Engineering
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I studied computer science at Stanford starting in 2003. Originally, I thought I wanted to get a Ph.D. and did research at the AI lab, but ultimately the research work felt too slow and abstract for me. After undergrad, I started my career working at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management.
Location: Mountain View, CA
Current role: VP of engineering at Quora
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I was born and raised in China. I got my Bachelors degree from Peking University and then came to the US for grad school. I started my first full time job at Google after I got my PhD. After seven years at Google, I joined Quora. In my professional life,
Location: Reston, Virginia
Current Role: Director of Engineering in Nuance Communications
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I am not just an engineer by training but one by heart! After my undergraduate degree in engineering, I started my career in Digital Image Processing / Graphics engineering and in a couple of years transitioned into Software engineering. I spent over a decade designing and developing software products and solutions for a wide range of business domains including Telecommunication,
Location: San Francisco, CA
Current Role: Web Engineering Lead
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I received my undergraduate degree in CS from Carnegie Mellon University, after which I spent more than six years as a software engineer at Google, where I worked on internationalization and Gmail frontend. I made the move to Asana because I was ready to learn more and grow as an engineer.
Location: SF Bay Area
Current Role: Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners (aka I’m a VC now)
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
Started my career as a software engineer, worked for a variety of startups, and stumbled into management early in my career. My first job out of college was with a startup; the team was growing quickly and we had very few seasoned managers. I was prone to organizing things around me and taking point on group projects,
Location: San Francisco
Current Role: Head of Payments, Stripe
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I first joined Facebook after completing my MS at Stanford in theoretical computer science and AI. I started off as an individual contributor, but transitioned into engineering management after realizing how much I enjoyed leading projects and helping other engineers develop. I got some early exposure to management even as an IC—I was a tech lead on News Feed where I worked on a rewrite of the product and internal API infrastructure,
Location: San Francisco
Current Role: Director of Engineering at PlanGrid
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I grew up in Germany and moved to the Bay Area 4.5 years ago to join a small startup. I gathered a fair amount of technical and project leadership experience in my first two jobs, but I didn’t get into people management until I joined PlanGrid at the end of 2015.
Location: Mountain View, CA.
Current role: Senior Engineering Manager at Google for Places API. I am building a team that’s focusing on providing Places data to enterprises and 3rd party developers.
What is your background and how did you get into management?
I moved to America from Russia after high school in 1999. It was the middle of the tech boom and I quickly joined a startup company, Live365, that focused on allowing anyone to create music stations.
