Engineer Access

If you're a director+ eng leader in NYC, join us on Wednesday July 17th from 6.30pm - 9.30pm in NoMad (28th and Park) for a joint monthly meetup for our Startup CTOs and Geeks Who Lead communities. After some initial networking, we're going to kick off at 7pm with a panel of practitioners and vendors sharing hard won lessons on leveraging LLMs. Then we’re going to break out into interest groups with both a domain expert and a facilitator around emerging good practices for: - Building - Prototyping and building LLM based solutions - Hiring - Attracting, evaluating and managing data science and data engineering talent - Productionizing - Running inference and/or training workflows efficiently and effectively Many thanks to Engineer Access, Primary Venture Partners, and this month mabl and Zenhub for supporting our events.

Productionizing LLMs at Perplexity.ai - Platform/tooling lunch If you're a NYC based senior engineering leader (Staff+ IC or Director+ manager) focused on core infra/devops/platform/enablement/devex/tooling, apply to join our inaugural Platform/Tooling lunch in NoMad (28th and Park) on Wednesday July 18th from 12pm - 2pm. We've invited Aarash Heydari to share some of his experiences designing and running the cloud infrastructure at Perplexity. Perplexity is a free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question. It’s also a relatively small startup that’s having an outsized impact in the world of LLM powered search. Aarash is responsible for running their cloud infrastructure for both training and inference. He'll be sharing his journey from wrapping API calls to developing their own infrastructure for both fine tuning and for hosting inference based on open source models, sharing some heuristics he’s learned for managing both training and inference workloads at scale. If you’d like to connect and learn with other platform leaders trying to get up to speed with good practices for managing LLM based workloads, apply to attend! This will be an intimate event and we’ll be selecting no more than 20 senior platform leaders to join us in a board room to discuss the topic. Lunch will be provided. The event is free. Whether you want to learn more about operating LLMs, share your experiences to date, or simply connect with and learn from other senior engineering leaders running core infra and platform groups, the Platform/tooling lunch is a great opportunity to learn how other companies are handling infrastructure and developer tooling and to build a community of local peers over lunch. Many thanks to Engineer Access, Primary Venture Partners and this month, Zenhub for supporting our events!

Amazing breakfast yesterday as Rachana Kumar, CTO @ Etsy shared her experiences with a room full of CTOs at Scale. Great discussion on how to structure, support and invest in incremental, adjacent and disruptive innovation with input from lots of great CTOs! If you run an engineering org of ~80 -> 5000, just ping me or sign up (link in the first comment) if you'd like to get notified of our free monthly breakfasts in NYC! And thanks as always to Primary Venture Partners and Engineer Access without whom we couldn't run the events at all!

Amazing breakfast yesterday as Rachana Kumar, CTO @ Etsy shared her experiences with a room full of CTOs at Scale. Great discussion on how to structure, support and invest in incremental, adjacent and disruptive innovation with input from lots of great CTOs! If you run an engineering org of ~80 -> 5000, just ping me or sign up (link in the first comment) if you'd like to get notified of our free monthly breakfasts in NYC! And thanks as always to Primary Venture Partners and Engineer Access without whom we couldn't run the events at all!

Thanks so much to Primary Venture Partners and Engineer Access for supporting the inaugural set of Geeks Who Lead monthly meetups in NYC. On Tuesday night, Octavian Costache co-founder and CTO at Stellar Health shared his thoughts on "shipping at Stellar" and how they focus on effective, low ceremony approaches to delivering business value. Wednesday morning, we had a great conversation with Robert Matsuoka, Head of Engineering at Tripadvisor about his experience in creating a global engineering org at our CTOs at Scale breakfast, and last night we brought together our broader Director+ community of engineering leaders to learn from Travis Donia, Director of Engineering at Pinecone about building and scaling a great Developer Experience. If you'd like to get notified of future meetups - either in NYC or online as we start to roll out our global engineering leadership community later this month, apply to join us! Can't wait until May!!!

NYC In-person Engineering Leadership meetups starting this month! Thanks to the support of Engineer Access and in conjunction with Primary Venture Partners I'm excited to say that we'll be kicking off regular monthly engineering leadership meetups in NYC starting this month! - Startup CTOs - If you're most senior engineering leader (VPE+) at a venture backed startup that's raised $10m+ and has 10+ FTEs in product/engineering join the Startup CTO meetup the evening of Tuesday April 16th - 6.30pm in NoMad. Featuring a fireside chat with Octavian Costache, CTO/cofounder at Stellar Health - https://lnkd.in/eTwr7Q4Y - CTO at Scale - If you're the most senior engineering leader running an org of 80-100+, join us for the CTOs at Scale breakfast on Wednesday April 17th at 8am in NoMad, featuring a discussion with Robert Matsuoka, Head of Engineering at Tripadvisor - https://lnkd.in/eypdjzdv - Geeks Who Lead - If you're a director+ engineering leader at a product company (not a dev shop), join the broader Geeks Who Lead community Wednesday April 17th at 6.30pm - https://lnkd.in/egaG53tQ It's going to be a great opportunity to connect with and learn from your closest engineering leadership peers. More info on the booking pages. DM me if any questions!

Had a great time this morning discussing "the future of the engineering org" with the Seattle CTO Club (https://lnkd.in/gvwwrEvG) - thanks Jeremy Wadsack for organizing and Claudius ⧑ Mbemba 🇨🇲 for the invitation! Broadly we were discussing the big changes impacting engineering orgs. We started off by discussing scope and the relationship between product and engineering and where data science and data engineering best sit as we start to productionize LLMs. We then got into the whole remote/hybrid/RTO discussion and how it impacts the geographic spread of teams. We then discussed efficiency and how post-ZIRP/post-year of efficiency changes are impacting how we think about staffing the management ranks in engineering orgs. We then looked briefly at the impact of low code, no code, API point solutions (Auth0, contentful, etc) on the amount of engineering required to deliver business value. Finally we looked at trends in Platform and developer tooling - from cloud IDEs and developer portals to the application of GenAI across the SDLC to discuss how that might impact the composition of dev teams over time. Lots of lively discussion and I got a lot of great feedback and suggestions for best practices. Look out for some articles as the year progresses!