Engineering Leadership

This series collects essays on engineering leadership at staff and senior IC levels — the kind of leadership that has nothing to do with formal authority. It’s about the patterns I’ve watched (and lived through) on the way from “deepest technical contributor in the room” to “person whose impact compounds through others.”

A few recurring threads I keep coming back to:

Leading without authority. The shift from doing the work yourself to multiplying through peers when nobody reports to you. How to get others invested in your priorities without managerial leverage — and what makes that work over time.

Outcome dominance over positional dominance. The hidden ego trap of needing to be the source of every best idea, and what changes when you optimize for the project’s win instead of yours. Most “be humble” advice is positional thinking with better PR; the real shift is in what you’re optimizing for.

Presence over attendance. What real listening looks like when meetings get harder, faster, and noisier — and the silent ways “showing up” stops being enough. The damage done by silent nods and disagreements that never enter the room.

Execution at scale. Migration patterns, layered execution models, and the harness engineering that turns AI agents into reliable teammates instead of liabilities. Where the methodology enables the tooling, not the other way around.

Trustworthy signals. When green pipelines lie, AI agents misjudge, and the systems we built to give us confidence stop being reliable. The work of restoring trust in the signals that production runs on.

The audience is anyone navigating the senior-IC-to-staff transition — the career stretch where technical depth gets out-leveraged by leadership patterns, where “the best idea wins” stops being the only thing that matters, and where your impact starts being measured in the systems and people you grow rather than the code you write.

The posts in this series, in publication order:

A green spotlight on a tripod standing on cracked red ground

The Pipeline Was Green: AI Agents and CI Trust

An AI agent upgraded a Helm chart, the pipeline said green, and QA was broken for three days. The first instinct was to lock everything down. The better answer was harder to accept.

Diagram of a prompt pipeline running across infrastructure repositories

Harness Engineering: Layers Made It Universal

What harness engineering looks like when the work is infrastructure, not application code.

people are in the room with you but you are not

Full Attendance, Zero Presence in Meetings

Most listening advice says add behaviors. The real fix is the opposite — stop doing everything else.

Diagram of a service migration flipped from per-service to per-step execution

Flip the Axis: Layer-Based Service Migration

How parallelizing by step instead of by service helped a half-sized team do twice the work

Silent need for positional dominance destroys your career

Positional Dominance: A Senior Engineer Trap

When a teammate proposed a better design than mine, my first instinct was to defend my own — not because of logic, but because it was his idea, not mine.

Delegating Without Authority as a Senior Engineer

As senior engineers, we often hit the ceiling at some point: our individual output is high, but writing more code or spinning up one more cluster does not feel like the best way to make more impact. A more significant impact comes from multiplying our efforts. But how do you do that without a team reporting to you? How do you effectively involve peers in your projects, influencing their priorities when you don’t control their backlog or performance review? ...