The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Rong Yan, the CTO of HeyGen, brings nearly 20 years of experience from tech giants like IBM and Facebook. In this discussion, he delves into the transformative potential of interactive AI avatars for leadership and team dynamics. Rong emphasizes building an AI-first company, highlighting the balance between speed and quality in engineering. He shares insights on maximizing team productivity by investing in top performers and fostering a culture of responsibility. Additionally, he explores the evolving role of leaders in AI-driven environments, encouraging continuous growth and adaptation.

In this engaging discussion, Rajashree Pimpalkhare, VP of Engineering at Twilio and a champion for women in tech, shares her insights on redefining the engineering role in business. She emphasizes the need for engineering leaders to find their seat at the table and foster creativity across teams. Rajashree discusses shifting from a 'no, but' to a 'yes, and' mindset for problem-solving and highlights strategies to combat learned helplessness in organizations. The conversation also touches on the transformative potential of generative AI and the importance of clear communication in complex topics.

Gokul Rajaram, an early-stage technology investor and former executive at companies like DoorDash and Block, shares insights on how engineering leaders can drive business success. He discusses connecting customer outcomes to financial metrics and shifting from feature-driven to customer-centric strategies. Gokul also introduces the ICE framework for idea prioritization and emphasizes the importance of data analytics and stable team structures in engineering. He highlights personal productivity tips and the role of inspiration in motivating teams.

Ryan Fox, CTO at Super.com and former SWE at Google, shares insights from his leadership transition from VP of Engineering to CTO. He emphasizes the importance of a 'not do' list for prioritizing responsibilities and aligning team outcomes with company goals. Ryan discusses effective coaching strategies for department heads and the significance of situational leadership in engineering management. He also dives into the benefits of mission-aligned teams, highlighting their role in enhancing collaboration and accountability within organizations.

Nick Hurlburt, Executive Director of the Aselo program at Tech Matters; Manju Abraham, VP of Engineering at HPE; and Bhupesh Bansal, Head of Engineering at Square, share their insights live from ELC Annual 2024. They discuss transformative leadership lessons, highlighting the importance of collaboration and trust. Tips for newcomers at conferences are revealed, emphasizing networking for personal growth. The trio also explores strategies for navigating organizational change and the significance of community support in fostering professional development.

Joining the conversation are Scott Swedberg, CEO of The Job Sauce, and Eric Fettner, its Co-founder, both experts in high-touch recruitment for startups. Lawrence Bruhmuller, SVP at Great Expectations, shares his insights from engineering leadership. They discuss navigating career growth amid a flat organizational structure and the impact of AI on roles. The trio highlights the importance of effective partnerships between engineering teams and hiring managers. They also stress maintaining an organization's engineering culture and innovating recruitment practices to refine hiring outcomes.

Ali Littman, VP of Engineering at Modern Health, shares her expertise on scaling organizations. Tarik Kilick, an engineering leader at Booking.com, dives into the art of winning buy-in from senior leaders. Mehmet Sencer Kardayi, CTO at Dexter Energy, emphasizes the importance of emotional regulation in tough conversations. Liz Sink, Director of Engineering at Amount, discusses building psychological safety within teams. Together, they highlight strategies for fostering community connections and the vital role of curiosity in leadership.

Anurag Agarwal, a leader in Google Workspace engineering with 18 years at Google, and Lizzie Matusov, co-founder of Quotient and a thought leader in engineering leadership, dive into AI's impact on collaboration and innovation. They discuss how AI is revolutionizing product development, enhancing user experiences, and reshaping team dynamics. Their insights on fostering autonomy and trust within teams, navigating ethical AI practices, and maintaining effective communication provide a compelling look at leading in a tech-driven landscape.

Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering at Figma, and Arquay Harris, former VP of Engineering at Webflow, explore the pivotal role of collaboration in engineering teams. They discuss evolving practices for fostering transparent communication and trust, and they highlight tools like Figma's DevMode for seamless teamwork. The duo emphasizes the importance of empathy between design and engineering, sharing strategies like 'premortems' for success. Their insights on building proactive relationships illustrate how strong collaboration drives productivity and innovation.

We had a blast at ELC Annual 2024, so we wanted to bring our podcast listeners some of the best highlights from popular sessions! This episode features one of the ELC Annual sessions with Anupam Singh (VP of AI & Growth Engineering @ Roblox) & Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft), as they discuss building AI/ML models at a massive scale. Anupam shares how Roblox – an immersive 3D platform with more than 77 million daily active users – scaled from zero to nearly 200 different AI models. They discuss strategies for deciding when to use open source vs. creating proprietary models; how to operationalize your models for 24/7 use; the importance of data pipelines; current and future challenges to keep in mind when creating / scaling AI models; and answer some questions from the live Q&A.ABOUT ANUPAM SINGHAnupam leads Roblox's AI & Growth engineering teams, which provide the infrastructure for high throughput AI services for safety, recommendations, and assistants. Before Roblox, Anupam was chief customer officer at Cloudera, where he led product, engineering, and field teams for Data Warehousing products. Anupam has co-founded two companies in the Big Data space, acquired by Cloudera and Marketshare, respectively. Anupam built his database expertise on the SQL Query Optimizer teams at Oracle, Sybase (now SAP), and Informix (now IBM). He graduated from Pune University in India and holds patents in the areas of automatic SQL performance tuning, object databases, and resilient query execution."The journey always starts with, 'Let's pick a model and first decide whether we want to build our own model or we want to use one of the open source ones.' The next step is, 'Do you want to do it on public cloud?' Roblox has 24 data centers worldwide and two massive data centers in America. We have hundreds of thousands of CPUs that we could use and so for us, it's very important to decide, 'Do we really need a large model? Can you take the 700 billion model, make it into a 7 billion parameter model, and magically get it to run on the CPU?'”- Anupam Singh   ABOUT MARIA KAZANDJIEVAMaria is a co-founder and an engineering leader at Graft, an early-stage AI startup. Prior to that, Maria worked at Netflix, where her team earned two Emmy awards for technical achievement. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Outside of work, you can find Maria kickboxing & trail running, baking & eating carbs, or relaxing with a non-fiction book and her two feline supurrvisors, Foosball and Gemma.SHOW NOTES:How Roblox is being powered by AI (00:30)The process of scaling AI models from zero to 200 @ Roblox (2:34)Examples of Roblox starting with open source vs. building its own model (5:06)What AI models are doing in terms of safety for children (7:12)Strategies for deciding to use open source vs. building a proprietary model (11:19)Why Roblox is choosing to open source some of their own models (13:06)How to operationalize / engineer AI models for 24/7 use at scale (14:20)The importance of data pipelines in the AI journey (16:18)Current / future challenges as Roblox continues to scale its models (19:52)Tips for identifying use cases where implementing & scaling AI can be helpful (22:21)Audience Q&A: How do you make decisions when you’re lacking specific measurements / quantities? (24:29)When you deploy a model, how do you ensure confidence in its performance? (27:36)Recommendations for allocating / estimating the budget for a model (29:03)Anupam’s insights on maintaining so many models effectively (31:03)How do you imagine the multimodality of your 3D models moving forward? (33:11)This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.