LeadDev's PriorityZero

Annie Vella, a distinguished engineer at Westpac New Zealand, shares her remarkable career journey. She discusses the challenges of gender in tech, emphasizing resilience and confidence. Annie reflects on her transitions between technical and managerial roles, highlighting the importance of adaptability and continuous learning. The conversation also dives into how AI tools like ChatGPT are reshaping software engineering, alongside the rising trend of prompt engineering, underscoring the need for evolving skills in the tech industry.

In this discussion, Nick Means, VP of Engineering at MedScout and a speaker at LeadDev London 2024, shares insights on leadership and individual strengths. He emphasizes the importance of 1:1 meetings and storytelling as tools for effective management. Nick likens software engineering to a character-building video game, highlighting team dynamics and diverse skills. He also tackles the challenges of bureaucracy in larger organizations and the intricacies of building an AI team, recommending Perplexity AI to aid in navigating this complex landscape.

Katerina Iliakoupoulou is a senior machine learning engineer at Meta, previously with the New York Times. She discusses her surprising decision to leave the journalism world for tech, emphasizing the necessity of deep domain knowledge for engineers. The conversation shifts to building impactful ML solutions, particularly for Facebook Reels, highlighting the importance of teamwork and iteration. Katerina also shares insights on the future of recommendation systems and the evolving role of machine learning in enhancing user experiences.

Welcome to PriorityZero, an engineering leadership podcast from LeadDev. I'm your host, Scott Carey, the editor in chief at LeadDev. I've been covering the software business for the best part of a decade, and I love to hear how engineering leaders are solving big people and technical problems. Subscribe to this podcast to hear how the best software engineering leaders in the business made their start in the industry, how they think about leadership, and their biggest priority right now. In this first season you will hear from: Katerina Iliakopoulou, Senior ML engineer at Meta Nick Means, VP of Engineering at MedScout Dan Blundell, Engineering Director at Gymshark Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI Annie Vella, Distinguished Engineer at Westpac Alicia Collymore, Engineering Manager at Incident.io Rafe Colburn, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Depop Gary Stevens, Director of Engineering at Trainline Matt Boyle, Engineering Manager, Cloudflare