The Engineering Leadership Podcast

In this episode, Sergiy Nesterenko (CEO @ Quilter) joins the pod to share how he turned a personal technical challenge into his own company, even before the market caught up. He shares his unique journey from SpaceX to Quilter and addresses common eng leader / founder challenges, including taking critical feedback to solve tough technical problems, knowing when your most important role is educating the market / customers, and choosing the right customers. Sergiy and Jerry also dissect insights into principles around building circuit boards, and common misconceptions around hiring top-tier talent, finding investors, and procuring customers as an early-stage company.

 

ABOUTSERGIY NESTERENKO

Sergiy Nesterenko is the Founder and CEO of Quilter, the first physics-driven AI platform that fully automates PCB layout design. Under his leadership, Quilter has pioneered autonomous board design – creating the missing automation layer for hardware and compressing weeks-long layout cycles into hours. Backed by Index, Benchmark, Coatue, and Tony Fadell, Quilter is redefining what's possible in hardware development. Previously, Sergiy spent five years at SpaceX as a Senior Radiation Effects Engineer, building electronics for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.

 

SHOW NOTES:

Introducing Sergiy Nesterenko & the inspiration behind Quilter (1:43)

Why now is the right time to tackle this technical challenge (3:37)

The technology landscape during Quilter’s early days (6:05)

Sergiy’s fundraising journey & key takeaways (8:26)

The importance of adopting an evolutionary mindset (10:52)

Early problems that Quilter aimed to solve (13:08)

Navigating the balance between technical problems & consumer readiness (15:59)

How negative feedback can lead to solving a key problem (18:34)

Knowing which feedback to incorporate into product iterations (20:08)

Lessons learned from choosing the wrong customers (27:33)

First principles approach to circuit board building (29:31)

Signals that it’s the right time to tackle a hard technical challenge (34:04)

Advantages to solving really hard problems & tackling entrepreneurship (36:32)

Common misconceptions surrounding early phase companies (38:17)

Sergiy’s experience working with Eric @ Benchmark (39:46)

Why investors like founders who spend time in the “idea maze” (42:19)

Strategies for convincing high-profile talent to join your org early on (43:22)

Rapid fire questions (45:10)

 

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder & CPO @ Graphite, reveals his journey to becoming a founder and some of the major moments from Graphite’s product development story. He dissects frameworks for determining when it’s time to quit your full-time job to pursue becoming a founder and analyzing the costs vs. benefits of that decision. We cover how to decide what customer problems to solve, understanding how software development trends impact what you’re building, and product market fit and selling considerations. Lastly, Tomas shares valuable strategies when it comes to selling to developers.

 

ABOUT TOMAS REIMERS

Tomas Reimers is the CPO and co-founder of Graphite, the a16z and Anthropic-backed AI code review platform that Cursor acquired in December 2025. Previously, he was an engineer at Facebook. Passionate about advancing developer velocity, Tomas holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvard University.

 

SHOW NOTES:

The origin story behind Graphite (1:05)

Signs that it’s time to quit your job / found a company (4:03)

How Tomas & his co-founders knew it was time to break up with their jobs (5:40)

Understand what leaving your job will mean career-growth wise (7:33)

Embracing regret minimization (9:28)

Pros & cons of developing in blue ocean vs. red ocean areas as a founder (11:49)

Strategies for determining what software to build / how is software dev evolving (14:00)

Tomas’s framework for determining bets (15:50)

Recommendations for selling as a founder (17:52)

Identifying if sales isn’t working or if product market fit is off (20:35)

Using customer insights to experiment & make a PMF pivot (23:05)

Why developers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be taught (24:42)

How to apply teaching vs. selling into early GTM strategy (27:20)

Utilizing demonstrations to gain developer buy in & trust (29:24)

What Tomas is looking forward to in Graphite’s future / software dev in general (32:04)

Rapid fire questions (33:34)

 

LINKS AND RESOURCES

The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

Founding Sales - The Startup Sales Handbook - rhe distillation of Pete Kazanjy’s experience at his first software startup, TalentBin going from a founder with a product marketing and product management background to early sales guy, early sales manager, and eventual post-acquisition sales leader at Monster Worldwide in addition to his later experience founding Modern Sales, the nation’s largest sales operations, enablement, and leadership community.

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts - Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of Engineering @ Snowflake, joins the Engineering Leadership Community Podcast to discuss all things AI – most importantly, how Snowflake is utilizing AI internally to iterate faster with smaller, focused teams. Vivek shares how AI and lower coding costs ultimately help Snowflake implement tighter feedback loops between customer & eng teams to speed up product development rollout and how Snowflake empowers their orgs to upskill when it comes to AI. Jerry & Vivek also break down what quality leadership looks like across the board and the role of AI in shaping today’s eng leaders.

 

ABOUT VIVEK RAGHUNATHAN

Vivek Raghunathan is Snowflake's SVP of Engineering. Before joining Snowflake, Vivek co-founded Neeva, one of the first AI-native search engines for consumers, which was acquired by Snowflake in 2023. Prior to that, he spent more than a decade at Google, where he led YouTube monetization and helped launch Google Now.

 

ABOUT SNOWFLAKE

Snowflake is the data and AI platform that many of the world's largest organizations rely on to power their most critical operations. Whether a bank is approving a loan, a retailer is optimizing its supply chain, or a hospital is bringing together patient data, Snowflake helps organizations unify data, apply AI, and make faster, more informed decisions. Today, over 13,900 companies rely on Snowflake to turn their data into business value, with enterprise-grade security, governance, and scale built-in.

 

SHOW NOTES:

Where Snowflake is on their AI adoption journey (0:57)

Using AI to help eng orgs meet maximum velocity (3:04)

Defining traits of engineers who successfully leverage agentic tools (5:55)

The benefit of cross collaborative skillsets for eng leaders (8:53)

How AI is helping orgs test infrastructure rewrites effectively & less expensively (10:09)

Discovering AI patterns @ Snowflake (11:44)

Why Snowflake gives teams a week off to learn the necessary AI tools (16:37)

Compressing the product dev cycle with the help of AI (18:28)

Simplify eng teams / encourage fluidity of roles (19:49)

Vivek’s perspective on leveraging AI to best support customer needs (22:45)

Building control planes to support enterprises (24:30)

Methods for consolidating data / making it accessible to the entire org (27:18)

How AI shapes what a quality leader looks like (30:39)

The role of empathy in leadership (33:49)

Rapid fire questions (35:08)

 

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Russ d’Sa (CEO & Co-founder @ LiveKit) joins the show to deconstruct the "Product Paradigm Shift" toward voice-driven interfaces and agent-centric UX . We dive into LiveKit’s high-stakes scaling lessons: from powering OpenAI and Character AI’s voice mode, how they navigated real time bottlenecks to hit the next level of scale, the architectural necessity of a multi-cloud strategy, and the foundations of a co-founder relationships that can effectively blend engineering & business strategy.

 

ABOUT RUSS D’SA

Russ is a startup vet who founded his first company in the 2007 YC batch and was the 2nd frontend engineer hired at Twitter, Russ d'Sa now leads voice AI unicorn LiveKit. They're the backbone of ChatGPT Voice Mode, Salesforce Agentforce, Grok, and roughly 30% of US 911 calls.

 

ABOUT LIVEKIT

LiveKit is an open source framework and cloud platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. It provides the tools you need to build agents that interact with users in realtime over audio, video, and data streams. Agents run on the LiveKit server, which supplies the low-latency infrastructure (including transport, routing, synchronization, and session management) built on a production-grade WebRTC stack. This architecture enables reliable and performant agent workloads.

 

SHOW NOTES:

The product paradigm shift toward voice-driven apps and natural human-computer interfaces (2:44)

Voice-apps in practice: How these trends impact the strategy of product building today (5:32)

Early adopters: Why legacy industries like healthcare use voice AI (7:55)

Reevaluating and building product experiences optimized for AI agents (12:52)

How AI trends will impact roadmaps and Go To Market (18:16)

The origin of LiveKit: Building real-time infra for the pandemic (21:07)

The OpenAI moment: Powering the fastest-growing consumer app (23:48)

Scaling with OpenAI: Navigating the challenges of balancing time-to-market with system design (25:39)

The Character AI outage: Solving cross-continental state sync and hitting the next level of scale (29:00)

The problem: When telemetry breaks first: Managing analytics and logging for millions of concurrent AI sessions (32:04)

Architecting for resilience: Multi-cloud from day one and why treating infra as a utility matters (33:22)

Co-founder dynamics: Blending engineering strategy with business outcomes (37:15)

Rapid Fire Questions (40:51)

 

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Patrick discusses what it means to build an empowered career & explore creative career portfolios with Jean Hsu (VP of Engineering @ Range) and Cate Huston (author of The Engineering Leader and fractional CTO @ Twill). Both share their unique engineering leadership journeys & how they built creative career paths through exploration & finding room for optionality. We dissect the identity crisis that eng leaders face – whether they are ICs or managers – and how to navigate the tension between individual & team productivity, especially taking into consideration AI. Lastly, Jean and Cate share insights on letting go of societal norms, unique ways to expand your work, taking on bets, and incorporating your values into your career.

 

ABOUT JEAN HSU

Jean is a builder, writer, coach, and fractional VPE at Circuit & Chisel. She was previously in leadership roles at Pulse, Medium, and Range, and also built out a leadership development company focused on engineers. She lives in Berkeley with her partner and three kids.

 

ABOUT CATE HUSTON

Cate is the author of The Engineering Leader, fractional CTO at Twill, and engineering leadership coach. She was previously in leadership roles at DuckDuckGo and Automattic, and an advisor at Glowforge. She has been all over the world, but now lives in Ireland.

 

Check out DRI Your Career today and use promo code “ELCPODCAST” for 15% off any of Cate and Jean’s three courses!

 

SHOW NOTES:

What it means for creative career paths to become the norm (1:42)

Navigating the tension between individual vs. team productivity (3:34)

What an empowered career looked like in Jean’s leadership journey (5:00)

Cate’s decision to craft her own career narrative (10:46)

Redefining work-life balance (12:54)

How to cultivate time to explore future projects & create room for optionality (15:59)

Why it can be challenging to find the space / time to experiment (19:17)

Let go of “societal shoulds” (23:37)

Frameworks for building out your career portfolio (28:43)

Unique ways to expand the type of work you can perform (30:23)

Using AI tools to help orient your career & incorporate your values (34:35)

Thinking about your career portfolio as bets (40:14)

Final thoughts on what it means to build an empowered career (44:47)

Rapid fire questions (46:13)

 

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.