StaffEng

Jonathan joins Alex and David to talk about what actually changes when agents get good enough to do the work. He walks through the 60-service monorepo migration that convinced him the ceiling had moved, why "raising ambition" is now a real coaching conversation with his team, and how Block is using linters and LLM-as-judge to keep GraphQL API design honest. The conversation goes past the usual velocity story into the harder question: engineering is multiplayer, and most AI tooling is s...

Karla joins Alex and David from Sydney, where she's been building security-conscious AI workflows at Lorikeet--a customer service automation company where writing code by hand has officially become "artisanal." https://www.lorikeetcx.ai/ https://x.com/tetrakazi

Dylan Vassallo is an engineering manager at OpenAI leading the People Innovation Labs team — an eng, product, and design team embedded within the People org, building AI-powered tools for recruiting, HR, internal comms, and the employee experience. In this episode, Dylan talks about what it actually looks like to be an engineering team inside a frontier AI company, how non-engineers are becoming builders, and what the "graduation" process looks like when a prototype needs to become a product...

Hosts: Alex Kessinger & David Noël-Ramos Guest: Karynn Ikeda — Former Engineering Manager → AI Enablement Program Manager at Babylist @ktikeda Karynn Ikeda shares the full arc of how Babylist adopted AI across its engineering organization — from a six-week Windsurf pilot on a single team, to company-wide Claude Code adoption and a bold initiative to onboard product managers and designers into the codebase. She discusses leadership buy-in, measuring developer sentiment over raw veloc...

Will Maier leads growth engineering at Stripe, where he's spent the last five years working across nearly every surface of the product. His background isn't CS — it's the history of science — and he's been through enough industry shifts (racking servers, the cloud transition, DevOps) to know when something really big is happening. Find us now also on YouTube: @StaffEngPodcoast In this season premiere of StaffEng, Will joins Alex and David to talk about what changed for him after November 2025...