In June 2025 a coworker interviewed me for the “Career Story” section of SurveyMonkey’s internal engineering blog. I’m sharing the results below.
How did you decide on a career in Engineering?
Growing up, I was both a tech and politics geek. My original career goal was to work as a researcher at the intersection of the two. Throughout school, I worked a series of part-time webdev and sysadmin jobs to support myself while I studied political science. Eventually though, tech won out. I saw my friends finishing their PhD programs struggling to establish careers, and in 2009 decided to stop after my Masters degree and work in technology full-time.
What steps/choices have you made that led you to the role you’re in today?
I lucked out in that my first full time job was with a bioinformatics group split between two universities. Knowing how to work well as part of a distributed team was key to many of my future jobs, including this one.
Afterwards, I worked for several other research groups. These were great jobs- the projects were interesting, and the close collaboration with researchers was very rewarding. However, they didn’t make for a great career. I didn’t have the exposure to new problems or experienced engineers that I needed to grow. I made the decision to focus on industry instead.
My big break was getting hired by Eventbrite in 2015, as the first and only systems engineer in their new Nashville office. This was a truly grueling interview process. Apparently the team was starting to frustrate their manager by continually rejecting candidates, so they let me squeak by after downleveling me! My three years there were full of amazing technical growth- Eventbrite had big ambitions and serious engineering problems needing solved to unlock them. Although at times it felt like I’d been thrown into the deep end, I was surrounded by very talented engineers and developed many skills that I still leverage today.
In 2018, I left Eventbrite for an opportunity I couldn’t pass up- the chance to work for Mozilla! I’d been a loyal user since the days of Netscape and was thrilled to join the team supporting the backend services for Firefox. It was while at Mozilla that I started to focus more effectively on the broader picture and earned the promotion to staff engineer. For my last year there, I even dipped my toes into management. Although in retrospect it wasn’t the right environment for me to make that transition, I learned an immense amount from it that makes me more effective as an individual contributor.
In late 2021, I connected with Reggie as he was looking for a lead engineer for a new team he was building at SurveyMonkey. The culture seemed good and the challenges sounded interesting. It’s almost 4 years later and I think that still holds true.
What advice would you give someone who’s just starting their career in Engineering?
My first piece of advice is that you shouldn’t listen to me! The environment today is very different than when I was getting started. Find people who are ahead of you but still early in their career, and learn from them.
That said, here are a few approaches to consider:
- Invest in the foundations. Not all levels of our industry move at the same pace. Instead of chasing trends, learn the fundamentals that they build on top of- things like unix, networking, and databases. This should serve you well over the long haul.
- Don’t specialize too early. Get exposure to a broad range of technology, problem domains, and practices. You grow by building different kinds of experiences to draw on. One of the great things about SurveyMonkey is the internal mobility and cross-team collaboration means you don’t have to leave to do this!
- Be the person you want to work with. It’s your people skills as much as your technical ones that will shape your career. A little helpfulness and kindness go a long way.