Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers and Leaders
Current role: VP of Engineering, Founder Partner at Planet Argon
Location: Portland, Oregon
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
It’s not conventional. In the second half of the 90s, I began dabbling with open source technologies. In particular, with Linux and Perl. During this time, I was also a high school dropout painting houses for three years.
The idea of working in tech didn’t appeal to me.
Current Role: CTO at Alloy
Location: Vancouver, Canada
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I have a background in Mechatronics Engineering, but I’ve always been drawn to the software side of things. When I graduated from University of Waterloo, I expected to stay in Canada and work on software in the robotics space. Instead, I ended up at Addepar and spent 3 years in Silicon Valley.
Current role: Director, Green & Energy Services
Location: Irvine, CA (headquarters)
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
After finishing my BS and MS in mechanical engineering, I went to work for a firm that works on large-scale energy efficiency projects. It was at this firm that I was given the opportunity to work on all aspects of these projects from the initial walk through & calculations/design,
Location: New York
Current Role: Codecademy VP of Engineering
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I’ve been working in technology since I was 15 years old and initially started by working with computer networks and data centers. After graduating with a computer science degree, I took my technical skills to build out technical pre and post sales teams. It was early on in my career that I realized it was much more rewarding and empowering to set others up for success and see them achieve their goals as opposed to being an individual contributor.
Location: San Francisco, CA
Current Role: Engineering Manager at DoorDash
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I come from a software engineering background. Prior to joining DoorDash, I worked at Esurance where I was promoted from developer to senior developer and finally manager over a three to four year period. I had a wonderful female boss who showed me my strengths and encouraged me to be a mentor and manager,
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Current Role: VP of Engineering
What is your background and how did you get into management?
My background in both management and engineering management is pretty unconventional. In college, I started out as a business major. After taking electives my first year, I took an accounting course in my second year and quickly realized that it was not for me. Ultimately, I took a bunch of science and philosophy of science courses that really reinvigorated me so I decided to go pre-med.
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,
