Career

Somewhere around year eight or nine, the question stops being hypothetical. Both paths are available. The organisation is large enough that both exist as genuine roles, not just titles. You have to actually decide. I’ve been close to this decision twice. The first time, at the startup, it was resolved by circumstance — there was no EM role to take, so staff-track it was. The second time, in a larger organisation, it was a real choice. Here’s the framework I used and what I’d change about it. ...

I’d worked at organisations ranging from twelve people to four hundred. The new role is at a company with tens of thousands of engineers. The systems are bigger, the coordination surface is larger, and some things I assumed were universal engineering truths turned out to be scale-specific. ...

I started writing code professionally in 2012. This year marks eleven years. The milestone prompts a kind of stock-taking that I find useful to do in writing. This is not a career advice post. It’s a personal retrospective on what happened, what I learned, and what I’d change — useful mostly as a data point rather than a prescription. ...

In the years at the European financial technology firm, the engineering organisation went through three significant restructuring events: a change in engineering leadership, a shift from functional to product-aligned teams, and a consolidation of two separate engineering groups. Each one produced the same kind of disruption and the same kind of opportunities. Org change is uncomfortable. It’s also underanalysed. Most engineers treat it as something happening to them, not something to navigate actively. ...

Over two years running engineering hiring at the firm, we made about twenty senior engineering hires. Some were transformative — engineers who raised the quality of everything they touched. Some were neutral — competent contributors who did what was asked and not much more. A few were net negatives. Looking back, the correlation between interview performance and outcome was weaker than I’d expected. The things that predicted good hires were visible in the interview, but we weren’t consistently measuring them. ...

The startup had been good. We’d grown from twelve people to forty, shipped something real, and the technical foundations were solid. But the Series B had brought in a new leadership layer, the founding team’s velocity calculus had changed, and I found myself doing more coordination than building. I’d been at this inflection point before — at the institution, actually — and I recognised what came next. The new role was at a well-established European financial technology firm. Structured, profitable, engineering-first culture, around 400 people. Not a startup. Deliberately not a startup. ...

I was promoted to tech lead at the startup in early 2020. The team was five engineers, including me. My previous experience managing people: none, unless you count mentoring a couple of interns. The first month was humbling. The second month was better. By the third month I had a clearer mental model of what the role actually required and how it differed from what I’d been doing before. ...

I left a well-paying, intellectually interesting job at a large financial institution to join a company with fewer than twenty people and less than a year of runway. My colleagues thought I’d lost perspective. My family was diplomatically concerned. Here’s the honest version of the reasoning. ...

I joined the large financial institution expecting to find bureaucracy that slowed down engineering. I did find that. I also found something I didn’t expect: certain constraints imposed by regulation, scale, and risk aversion produced genuinely better engineering decisions than I’d been making at the smaller trading firm. This is about the non-obvious lessons. ...

The job spec said “trading systems.” I assumed it would be similar to what I’d been doing — latency-focused, technically aggressive, small team, fast decisions. I was wrong on most counts, and right for reasons I didn’t expect. ...