Director to VP Engineering: what is expected and how to prepare? A lot of engineering leaders made it to the director level and now wonder what it looks like at a VP level, and even more importantly, how to prepare for that level in day to day job as a…

There is an excellent article on this topic: https://www.brendanreid.com/blog-1/4-tips-to-jump-from-manager-to-director. I truly enjoyed it and learned. Now that I crossed the bridge, I would like to share a few thoughts myself. The focus of this article is how to get ready for a director level as much as possible when you…

For a software engineer, as your career progresses, sooner or later, you will face a question: should I become an engineering manager? When I was there, I googled, read many articles, books and consulted with people, it stayed mysterious until I finally got it myself. …

Although there are tons of articles on software architecture on the internet, they are mostly from late stage startups or public companies. At Trace Data, a seed stage startup, we built our product from ground up in the past 15 months. In this article, I would like to share our…

In Sep 2019, I joined Trace Data, a seed stage startup on API security based in the Bay area, to head the engineering org. Although I have built and grown teams before, building a founding engineering team from zero is quite different. In this article, I share some of my…

Engineering leaders may often hear the idea of hiring a nearshore team, and think about this option. However, not many people have actually done it first hand. If you google “hiring nearshore team”, most articles are written by the nearshore companies, rather than the actual engineering leaders who did it. …

In the past 6 years, good or bad, I have been in an engineering leader role owning the most critical uptime or service availability in a few hyper growth companies. The tech stack varies from private data centers, AWS, and GCP. It is not an easy job. But I have…