The Peterman Pod New Grad to Principal Engineer (IC8) at Meta (Career Story)
8 snips
Jan 12, 2026 
Adrien Friggeri, principal engineer (IC8) at Meta, shares his inspiring career trajectory from new grad to tech leader. He delves into his experience building Bento, a key developer tool, and reflects on leading teams at Facebook and Instagram. Adrien discusses the importance of taking calculated risks, the value of agency in a hackathon culture, and transitioning to management to scale projects. He emphasizes the need for broad skills, networking, and staying curious while offering valuable advice for those starting their careers in tech.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Early Identity Shift To Software Engineering
- Adrien joined a data science team at Facebook and was told, "software engineers have power at this company."
- He embraced software engineering despite a PhD and viewed impact over title.
Bootstrapping A/B Testing At Instagram
- Adrien built Instagram's first A/B testing by hacking together exposure logging and hashing for buckets.
- He shipped experiments, proved the system, and was promoted to IC5 unexpectedly.
Creating Bento: From Script To Company Standard
- Adrien started Bento by reducing boilerplate and unifying data pipelines and ML workflows into a simple library.
- He grew it into a team, built Bento on demand, and became a tech-lead-manager (TLM2).