Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers and Leaders
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: 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.
Current role: Development Manager and Head of Front-end Engineering at eBay
Location: Sydney, Australia
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I graduated with a bachelor and master of Computer Science from the University of Wollongong in Australia and worked in hands-on technical roles before becoming a manager.
My journey to management is not unusual but not one that I had anticipated or planned for.
Location: San Fransisco Bay Area
Current Role: Sr. Director, Engineering/Acting Head of Engineering
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I started my career as a Software Engineer back in India and moved to the United States to get my Masters degree in Computer Science and AI/ML. I continued my career as an individual contributor for a few years in a small company which had a very flat structure.
Location: Vancouver, BC
Current Role: Director of Engineering
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
My background is completely liberal – I studied Economics and Philosophy and am a self-taught developer! I really loved coding and building little websites and that’s how I got into software (and web) development. I was a web developer for a while and joined Buffer as a full-stack engineer, but transitioned to an engineering manager in my first six months on the team.
Location: Los Gatos, CA.
Current Role: Build, CI & DevInsights Manager at Netflix
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I’ve worked in technology for 15+ years, starting in the finance industry, moving toward education and then consulting before joining Netflix. Earlier roles offered me the opportunity to act as an individual contributor in backend engineering before, at some point, being asked to manage a team. This path is not for everyone.
Location: Arlington, Massachusetts
Current role: Managing Product Development–Author, Consultant, Speaker
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I started work as a developer. I became a tester, a project manager, a manager, a program manager, a director, a developer and a VP. No one has a linear career and mine certainly hasn’t been linear.
As I project-managed small projects, I realized I liked project management. I had an opportunity to manage one person (!) as a young manager.
Current role: Backend Engineering Manager at DataFox
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
I went to MIT for undergrad and grad school for computer science and joined Box right after. At Box, I was on the Platform Integrations team as an individual contributor. I loved the culture at Box; it had a lot of highly motivated, experienced engineers. I learned a lot about how to ship production code,
Location: Boston, MA
Current Role: Manager, UX Research and Strategy, Cisco Cloud Security
What’s my background, and how did I get into management?
I’ve been working in product design and strategy in some form or another for 20+ years. I started as an information architect (a UX designer), and quickly moved into a lead role. After the dot-com era imploded, I switched to independent consulting, and did product design and strategy work for big brands,
