Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.
I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!
This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!
Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.
Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/
Episodes
204 episodes
Mission Driven - Adam Kircher: Co-Founder, Sirum
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Adam Kircher (Co-Founder, Sirum) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
Hilary Mason - Can they do the work?
I was lucky enough to attend a dinner during which Hilary Mason dropped more wisdom about hiring in one course than many people do in a 90-minute talk. In this week's episode, I get to chat with Hilary, learning how she thinks about screening f...
Mission Driven - Ariel Ekblaw: CEO, Aurelia
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Ariel Ekblaw (CEO, Aurelia) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
Jesse White - Lessons learned from burnout
Jesse White grew with the company over at OpenNMS, from developer through to hands on CTO. He started with a team of just five, but as the company and the team grew, he founds himself working longer and longer hours until he finally burned out....
Mission Driven - Nellwyn Thomas: CTO, Democratic National Committee
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Nellwyn Thomas (CTO, Democratic National Committee) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
Raffi Krikorian - Introducing Mission Driven
In this very special episode, I get to introduce and interview Raffi Krikorian about his new podcast series - mission driven - that we’ll be hosting and distributing on a regular basis. From VP Engineering at Twitter and leading t...
Short Byte: Ron Lichty - The multiple levels of engineering management
These days it’s quite possible to be hacking on an idea in a dorm room one week, and just a few weeks later to be the CTO of a venture backed startup. Unfortunately, jumping straight from college to the C suite can be problematic as t...
Short Byte: Matt Powell - Aligning annual planning with agile teams
There is always a tension in a mature business between the need for certainty when engaging with the rest of the company and the need for flexibility and agility when dealing with the complexities of software development. In this episode, Matt ...
Short Byte: Matt Stephenson - Diversifying your engineering pipeline through internships
It can be hard to think about your long term engineering talent pipeline when you need to hit your quarterly recruiting and product delivery milestones. But if you don’t start to invest in a talent pipeline you’re going to be scrambling every q...
Short Byte: Maher Saba - Remote Presence at Meta
In this week's interview, I get to chat with Maher Saba, VP of Remote Presence (and Head of Engineering) at Meta. Before Meta, Maher was a senior developer at IBM and a Dir Eng & Distinguished engineer at Microsoft. In our conversation, we ...
Short Byte: Francisco Larrain - Hiring multifaceted engineers
Francisco Larrain is the CTO and co-founder at Topsort - a company that provides auction-based ad infrastructure for multi-brand retailers and online marketplaces. Before that, he founded Zapped (payment tech) and ran local engineering at Group...
Short Byte: Steven Gaffney - Essential elements of a consistently high achieving team
From Amazon to Lockheed Martin, Steven Gaffney has helped a wide range of companies to improve the effectiveness of their teams. In this week's episode, we discuss the elements of a high achieving team - from having a clear north star purpose, ...
Short Byte: Vidal Graupera - Challenges of being an engineering manager
Often, developers are just thrown into engineering management with little to no training. 'Congratulations, today you're the manager,' and they don't know what to do. It's a totally different job." Vidal Graupera has spent years gathering insig...
Short Byte: Griffin Caprio - Career progression as an engineering leader
Griffin had a fairly traditional early career path, moving from sys admin and software development into engineering leadership. More recently he’s been scratching his entrepreneurial itch. In this interview, we discuss some of the things that m...
Short Byte: Mark Porter - Exercising Judgement
In this episode, I get to chat with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB. Mark was previously the CTO at Grab and the GM for RDS at AWS and, after joining MongoDB as CTO in the pandemic's early days, has scaled the engineering org from 400 to over 1...
Short Byte: Jeremy Johnson - Building a truly global, distributed engineering team
Jeremy Johnson has been building globally distributed teams since before it was cool 😊. After co-founding 2U, in 2014 he co-founded Andela to help companies to more easily take advantage of top engineering talent - in Africa and beyond.
Short Byte: Ravi Mayuram - Modernizing your data infrastructure
In this episode, I got to talk with Ravi Mayuram, CTO at Couchbase. From edge persistence and self healing databases to quantum computing, we got to chat about a range of the trends he’s been seeing in the data persistence space.PART...
Short Byte: Mindaugas Mozūras - Mental health for engineering leaders
In this week's episode, I got to talk with Mindaugas Mozūras, who runs an engineering org of over 400 people for Vinted out of Lithuania. We talked about the importance of mental health, the benefits of therapy, and what getting coaching and ...
Short Byte: Ismael Peinado - Simplifying Security
If you’re at Coinbase, JP Morgan, a power company, or the NSA, you can skip this episode. If you’re not expecting attacks from nation states, might you be able to simplify your security operations by focusing on the highest likelihood threat ...
Short Byte: Randy Kern - Bringing quality to your technology and your teams
Join me in this episode as I chat with Randy Kern, CTO at Marqeta about “bringing quality to your technology and your teams”. From code quality (Randy is a fan of strong typing and static analysis) to the value of early mentorship and the benef...
Short Byte: Ami Luttwak - The Scalable Startup
Wiz became the world's fastest unicorn last year when it raised $250m at a $6B valuation just 18 months after it was founded. In this episode, I chat with Ami Luttwak, Cofounder and CTO at Wiz about his experiences and model for building “the s...
Short Byte: Arunava Bag - Beyond DevOps - the promise of AI Ops
Arunava Bag is the CTO (EMEA) at Digitate and in this episode, he provides an introduction to the topic of AI Ops - how you can start to leverage machine learning to engage with the telemetry from your production systems to eventually provide f...
Short Byte: Satish Jayanthi - The CTOs guide to trends in data analytics
If you’re a software engineering leader who has been less focused on the data analytics and data engineering space over the last few years, join me in this week's episode where Satish Jayanthi, CTO and Cofounder at
Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá - Building global teams
In addition to being the SVP Eng at Ritchie Bros and previously being Head of Engineering, LATAM at Stripe, and VPE at Splice, Juan Pablo Buriticá is also one of the authors of the excellent Holloway guide to Remote Work
Short Byte: On Freund - What skills do your developers really need?!
Writing code is seldom the hardest part of launching and maintaining an application. In this week's episode, I chat with On Freund - cofounder and CEO of Wilco and previously VPE at Handy and WeWork. He shares his journey from completing a degr...
