New Grad to Principal Engineer (IC8) at Meta (Career Story)

26:46Now, the thing I was building was tooling and infrastructure, not at all data to consulting. So the first thing I did was like, hey, manager, I'm not going to do what my job is and what the team is doing, because I think there's an opportunity there. Are you okay with me doing this? Can we make it so, you know, we carve out two, three months for me to go explore that and make that part of my expectation. If it pans out, great. If it doesn't pan out, well, I was expected to go explore this. It was a calculated risk. We all agreed as a team, my manager, my skip, myself, that like that was a thing I was going to do.

27:21And at that point, you know, there's an agreement. This is the job you're going to do. Everyone is on the same page. I think it is a lot riskier to go and do your own thing. You know, you lock yourself in a room, do your thing for three months, show up and you're like, I did this thing. And then everyone's like, yeah, but no one knew that you were doing this thing. Over-communicate, I think, is really the strategy I would recommend. And also be ready to hear no. Like I was very lucky to have a manager that said, yeah, you know, I think that makes, it's risky, but it makes sense. Go do that. I've had, you know, instances later on in my career where I wanted to go do a thing and I building that consensus.

28:02And what I told was, no, don't do that. You mentioned that you transitioned to a TLM during this leg of your career as well. What was the thinking behind that transition? I was building the team, right? We were building this product. I knew we had to scale and we needed more people. And so then the question was, do I go hire someone to manage me and the rest of the team? Someone who might come in with a different vision for the team or a different strategy? Or do I try this management thing? And so to me, it was really driven by a desire to just take this little crew we had assembled and lead them or support them in building this product we wanted to build.

28:47So it was kind of like a natural evolution. It was not really a thought out, I want to be a manager. I'm going to transition into management and find a role like that. It was just I was tech leading a team. We needed more people. The team needed a manager. I ended up being the manager. So after you got this IC7 promotion, I understand that you left Meta with desire to start your own company. Yes. What was the thinking there and the story behind you leaving? How did that go? At that point, I had been at the company for about seven years. That was the only company I had ever worked at. You know, my professional experience before that was, like I said, doing a PhD, working in my own corner, seven years of Facebook and growing tremendously, learning a lot, but also not really knowing what happened in the outside world.

29:33And then I think there was also maybe a little bit of hubris. I was like, I built this like platform that's being used by at that point, 60 % of all people doing data at the company. I was like, I can go build that externally. You know, if Facebook needed this in 2018, the world is going to need that in like 2020 and I'm going to go build it. So I left and I thought I was going to do a startup. And then I realized that I'm not an entrepreneur or I wasn't at the time. You know, my change in the future, but at the time that was not who I was. I really enjoyed going deep into technical problems. And I think I had maybe underestimated the amount of work at the time needed for me to like build or rebuild by myself with like, you know, our team of like six had spent two years building on like a very mature infrastructure.

30:23I often joke that I left the company to do a startup and I ended up taking a sabbatical instead. It was wonderful to travel the world. I went to a lot of wonderful places, but I did not start a startup. I built a few prototypes. I found other people to work with with whom we had different ideas. Nothing really crystallized. What were the skill gaps between yourself at the time, successful tech lead and an entrepreneur? in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be able to delegate the hard stuff, right? You scale yourself through others. And to me, at that point, it basically meant that whenever something became interesting, I would have to find someone else to do it.

31:10My involvement would have to be superficial. And so, you know, I could hack a prototype together, but like if I wanted to take it to the next step, I would probably need to find like some engineers to go work on that while I go like, you know, try and figure out how to get people to use the thing in the first place. And I wasn't really into that. So after the sabbatical, you boomerang back to Meta. What was your thinking behind going to Meta? So like I said, COVID happened. I was living in New York at the time. And I was stuck in my tiny apartment. And I don't know, on a whim, I decided to buy a house in Denver.

31:45So moved to Denver, bought the house, got a mortgage. And I was like, I need like a full-time stable job. I interviewed with a few places. I had a few offers. At the end of the day, the reason I came back to Facebook was James Pierce. James Pierce is a fantastic manager. He was a director of engineering. His claim to fame is, you know, he was the manager behind the open source program at Facebook in the early days. he worked on portal he worked on so many amazing things uh and i always looked up to him and so when it came time to find a new role i reached out to a few people in my network including james and he was like yeah i'll take you come work for me so i entered you know i interviewed i did a behavioral interview because i boomeranged uh and they're like yeah you're still you're still not crazy you can come back uh got a few other offers but like at the end of the day it was really the draw of working with, you know, a few people I really knew and respected.

32:46And then I understand that you went to Clubhouse after. Yeah, this is, yeah, after, you know, so this is the crazy thing. I came back to Facebook in the summer of 2020, spent about seven months working on data infrastructure, kind of related to the stuff I had done before. And then a buddy of mine just put me in touch with one of the co-founders of Clubhouse. And now, you know, if you remember Clubhouse like went crazy viral and crazy growth in like late 2020, early 2021. And I remember, you know, talking to them at first, not seriously, because I was like, I've just been back at Facebook for seven months.

33:24I can't leave now. But I talked to like the two founders and I was like, oh, this is exciting. Oh my God, Zuck is on Clubhouse. And like, there's all of those people. Like it was having a moment. And it was, you know, all the talk. And so, yeah, I decided to join Clubhouse. You know, when I joined Clubhouse, the company was like maybe 10, 11 people. Insane amount of hype around it. A lot of users. And yeah, it was a very interesting year I spent there. You have any interesting insights or stories that you'd like to share? I joined the company to help with the data stack. There was one person working on data when I joined, Kenny D 'Amica.

34:05who was starting to put together the analytics stack. There was no machine learning at Clubhouse. There was no feed ranking, or at least not machine learned feed ranking. Clubhouse was like spamming people with notifications. And so a lot of the work I did in the early days was just building a lot of those systems. Like I said, built A-B testing for Instagram, built A-B testing for Clubhouse, because we wanted to be able to measure the stuff we were building, introduced some machine learning to Clubhouse to filter out the notifications we were sending because it was very spammy. What was the internal culture like?

34:41The culture was just very hands-on. A lot of people were very, very eager, extremely talented pool of engineers. Clubhouse was like this interesting mix where I think, you know, a large fraction of the company was either former Coinbase or former Facebook, pretty much. Yeah, a lot of like very independent, self-driven, hungry engineers who just wanted to build a really, really cool, authentic social network. So after Clubhouse, you went back to Meta for a second boomerang. For a second boomerang. I guess I had like unfinished business at Meta. No, you know, when I decided to leave Clubhouse, I actually did a very thorough job search.

35:24I ended up talking to a lot of companies. I had an offer from Apple that I really considered. The reason I decided to go to Meta was twofold. one a manager, Vincent Hardy, who had been my manager in the past, whom I wanted to work with again. Vincent at the time was the manager, the engineering director behind Ray-Ban Stories. Ray-Ban Stories is this partnership, you know, the glasses between Meta and Ray-Ban. And I was like, I've never worked on a product. I've never worked on hardware. I have this connection who is working on that and he's willing to take a chance on me. I kind of want to see what that pivot would look like being, you know, not being the data guy anymore, but kind of like working on something else.

36:12Yeah. That was one thing I wanted to know, which was you were entrusted with this Uber TL role working on in a very different domain than, than your past experience. And so So it sounds like the key that got you that role was that you came through a referral through someone, a trusted past manager. No, not entirely. So I was not interested with like any Uber TL role from the get-go. You know, I came back to the company as an IC7. Ray-Ban Stories had been released in September of 2021. And after launch, there were quality issues. There were growth issues. and so when I came in what I was asked to do was like hey can you like look at our growth story like you know about data can you look at like the data stuff a little bit make sure like you know we're we're dotting our i's and crossing our t's and so I spent about eight months a year uh working with fantastic leaders and engineers and data people on ray-ban stories to understand like where were things breaking uh where did we need to invest more where do we need to measure more and that's how I built the trust with that organization so it's been about a year doing that and then there was a reorg at the end of 2022 we merged a bunch of organizations together and people started getting different roles and you know we moved people around and I told my manager at the time hey you know it's been fun to do this but the reason I joined smart classes in the first place was I wanted to work on smart classes I didn't want to be the data guy anymore there's this project, I would really, really like to work on that.

37:50I know I don't have experience in hardware and product, but like you've seen, you know, my track record of the last year, I've developed this like product sense. Can I go help with that? And he was like, yeah, you can, you can move on to that project and work on that. There was another engineer who was actually the Uber TL and BSTO for that entire program. And so I spent the next couple of years, essentially working on that engine, just kind of like gaining more scope over time. And I ended up, you know, kind of like supervising all experiences across this specific hardware line. I don't go into details because the product is not yet released.

38:25But my job was to make sure that like all of the experiences, the user experiences on this specific device were good. And so that meant working with a lot of different teams across smart glasses and eventually what became wearables towards the end to make sure like we were shipping the right set of user experiences. Were there any growing pains in switching into this new domain? I think there were a lot of growing pains in the organization as the organization was growing and maturing. And so naturally those kind of like rippled onto me. In the early days, I struggled a lot with working or the cadence around working with hardware.

39:09You know, I started working in 2022 on something that will be released at some point is currently not released. And so this like extremely long lead time and validation and putting things in the hand of users was kind of missing. But once I got to a point where at least there was like internal fish fooding and dog fooding within the company. And we started getting like some feedback and some signal that made things a little easier. Do you have any advice on how to ramp up successfully in like a completely different domain? I think it's the same thing as like ramping up at a new company or a different flavor of it.

39:48I use the, you know, the boss strategy of doing the social network exploration thing first. Talk to people, ask them who I should be talking to. Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions. Like you're the noob on the team. Like everyone knows that you don't know anything. I'd rather ask a really silly question now rather than six months from now, not know what we're talking about and try and get your hands dirty. It's a thing I've always tried to do. Check out the code. Even if you're not going to like work on like, I never officially worked on firmware, right? I did check out the code and I did make a few tweaks just to like get a feel for it get an understanding of it uh and then kind of like map things out this way and then i'd say the last thing i'd say is pick a hard problem to solve i learn a lot by doing uh and so you know this might not translate to other people but like i learn by doing so i pick a hard problem to solve where i have kind of like an idea of how to solve the thing and then i can fill in the blanks as i go and that's where i learn on this team this is where you got your IC8 promo or your principal engineer promo what I'm curious what's the story behind that promotion what is the scope that actually got you promoted well so in this case I was eventually responsible like I said for like all experiences on a device and so I was working across multiple orgs you know dozens of teams I think at some point like the the set of PMs I was interacting with was probably like 35 or so PMs.

41:22And like, you know, however many engineering teams are working with that. My job at that point became a lot of like coordination and just like overall architecture. And my responsibility was making sure that we were delivering on our milestones from an experiences perspective. The reason I say experiences and on the whole device, by the way, is that the way we were organized is there were teams working on the OS layer. And, you know, So I would like work a little bit with them and communicate requirements and like poke holes into their story. But there were partners. I was not responsible for like that part of the stack.

42:00My responsibility was very specifically on the experiences we were shipping. So if you think about, say, RayBan Meta, for example, which is a product that's in market, the experiences on that would be all of the AI on the device, all of the music listening, the photo capture, and then all of the companion app stuff. So you can imagine something like that for another device. So that was the scope. I can go into a little bit of details on how I actually got the promo because that one was a little bit more work. Like if I think about like my entire, you know, set of promotions from IC5 to IC8, IC5, I had no idea that promo was a thing.

42:42It was kind of like a surprise. IC6, I had to like talk to my manager and be like, okay, do you think we can put me out for promo? And my manager was like, yeah, okay, yeah, I think you're ready. And it went through. IC7, it took a couple of cycles where we'd like to like do a few revs. IC8, I went to my manager and my manager at the time had never done an IC8 promo. And we're like, okay, so how do we do this? We partnered on writing the promo packet together. I wrote a substantial amount of the promo packet, obviously with his help. And then building consensus within the organization, going to multiple VPs early on and be like, Like, you know, this is the work that I've been doing.

43:30Do you see the ICA scope here? Would you be supportive of the promotion? And like building that consensus and seeking that mentorship in some cases, you know, there was a D2 in the organization who I knew would be absolutely critical in me getting this promotion. And so I went to him and I was like, you carry a lot of weight in this organization. I'd love to understand how I can make it to that level. Would you mind just having like a, you know, monthly conversation with me, just checking in and helping me course correct. And so six months later, when I went up for promo, he was supportive because he had been involved in the process the whole time.

44:07So identifying who the champions are is even more important for the highest level promotions and working with them to kind of understand what your gaps are so that when it comes time for that discussion, it's just a matter of logistics, but everyone is already aligned prior to that room. Yes. Now, to be clear, I don't want to make it sound like getting promoted is just a social game. Like you need to have the underlying work too. But you need to have both of those things. You need to have like the impact in the underlying work. But then it is also way easier, at least in my experience, to like build a consensus ahead of time.

44:46So that when you go to a, you know, performance calibration session, you don't have to, you don't have a debate in the room. Uh, and so for my I see a promo, it took two cycles. Like the first one, we started socializing. My manager even didn't even put me up for promo officially. And in that cycle, he just talked to people around and be like, you know, just feeling the water. And then in the following half, people had that context. They're like, oh, we're having this conversation. This is going to happen eventually. Uh, let's see what's missing, what we can do this half. and then obviously then you know with the amount of work i did in that half and the impact i had and that support and mentorship that's how i ended up getting it when it comes to the scope and the role that got you promoted it is it's a role that it it requires permission from from those around you to have that role you know there's there's only one uber tech lead on i mean you know relatively.

45:44There's one of that role available. It's not like you, kind of like your bento story, you created a role without permission from others and you kind of built it up into something. When it comes to that first type where there's a limited role and there's probably other people who would like to have that role. Do you have any advice on how to secure that scope for yourself or go towards that if that's something you're interested in? So funnily enough, that's not exactly the case. Because in this case, there was an Uber TL for this entire program. And he's a fantastic engineer, Jin Sung Yu. I just identified that there was a lot of work on experiences, specifically on the experiences side, working with product and design that I could help with, where, you know, he could focus on like the broader program, and I could just like narrowly tackle that area.

46:40Yeah. And so, you know, over time, he and I built this trust where I just started focusing on that. And I started taking that off his plate. He didn't have to worry too much about it. Instead of having to coordinate with like 10 or 12 different engineering teams on experiences specifically, he could just go through me. The system stuff, everything else he would do himself. But I ran a very tight chip on experiences. And so I made his life easier. And so in a way, I kind of like took that role upon myself. Like there isn't really like an Uber TL for experiences on each product line. I just kind of like, you know, carve that out for myself within that specific program.

47:19Now, at some point, you know, I worked with my leadership and I was like, hey, I've been doing this thing. And people are asking, like, why is Adrian doing that? Do you mind if we just say that, like, I'm the TL on experiences that would make my life easier? but it became a post hoc thing. Once I was already doing the work and I had done the work for about a year at that point, I just asked to be blessed with a little label so that I could explain who I was in a sentence as opposed to, I'm just this engineer who's touching all of the experiences. And then the thing I really wanna make clear here is that I've heard a lot of engineers talking about scope as in stealing scope from other people.

48:02That is the wrong way to think about it. you know, taking something off someone's plate doesn't mean that you're stealing from them, or it is if you're not talking to them about it. So again, I, and this is a constant across everything I've been talking about over communicate. I went to that engineer, I was like, hey, I am very excited about this space. Do you mind if I like help with this? And he's like, yeah, sure. I, you know, I'm swamped. If you want to take that on, take it on. And then, you know, I come back a few weeks later and say, hey, there's this other kind of like related thing. uh is it okay if i talk to them he's like yeah sure knock yourself out and like you know in the process then he can go and like explore other things uh and broaden his own scope yeah in my mind it's it's a win-win for for him because i mean i imagine you helped him scale himself so he can you know chase some other scope maybe he's going for ic9 or something like that and he has evidence that he grew someone to ic8 or helped i don't know if that was the case in this this example, but oftentimes TLs are gracious to give scope so that they can move on to bigger things and help you grow into their role.

49:10And similarly, I've done that, you know, with like more junior engineers where I had to actually fight with more junior engineers and tell them, Hey, can you, can you actually take that and like, just own it? Uh, like it's going to be good for you. I also would love to like be able to delegate that to someone. So coming to the end of your career story, I wanted to do some reflecting across some of the things that I saw. One thing I wanted to ask was, you have a unique skill set that is very software engineering heavy and also very data heavy from your past experience. And I'm curious, what unique career experiences were only possible through that lens?

49:50I think all of them. I think I've always tried to be a well-rounded engineer. And, you know, in addition to software engineering and like data, I think I've always tried to like develop a strong product sense and a strong design sense. At Facebook, we have like those archetypes once you reach senior staff and principal, and I've always been a product hybrid. And to me, like this, like well-roundedness is where I can add value, being able to both, you know, have like a deep product conversation with product management leaders and the next day go down and like debug some like firmware code. Uh, like being a well-rounded person, I think is one of the things that, uh, I've always taken pride in.

50:42Uh, Robert Heinlein has this quote, uh, where he says like a competent man should be able to like do all of those things, uh you know write a sonnet die calently and whatnot and he finishes and says specialization is for insects uh and it's it's one of the things that like i've always taken to heart i i love learning and i want to try and be good at a lot of different things uh and then you know bring this like panel of things to the table and so when i was working uh in wearables you know i would like build little prototypes uh you know like design my own little circuit boards and like hack things together.

51:21Obviously, not production ready. I'm not a hardware engineer. But having the ability to do that type of stuff means that you can start a conversation with people. You can go and talk to a product lead and be like, hey, I have this idea. Here's the thing you can play with. One thing you said, and this is evident to me throughout your career, you said something that your career is a series of bumping into the right people. You mentioned a quote like that. And throughout each leg of your story, there tends to be someone who either brought you along or was instrumental in one of the projects that got you promoted.

51:58I'm curious, do you have any tips on how to, I guess, maximize your luck when it comes to people opportunity? Oh, so many thoughts. The first one is, you know, like I've been talking a lot about myself for the last like hour now. None of the stuff I've done would have been possible if I was working in a vacuum. Like everything I've done has been, you know, working on a team, convincing people, getting people to, you know, go in bad for me. Like some younger software engineers, I had rough edges when I was earlier on in my career. I had like very strong opinions about things and that didn't always work out in my favor.

52:35And so I learned very quickly that, you know, we're all in this to succeed. And the best way to succeed is to help others succeed. Not to want anything in return, but just, you know, fostering success around you, right? A rising tide lifts all boats. And that's the thing that I've been trying to do in my career probably for the last decade or so. You know, the first like two, three years of my career, I was maybe a little selfish. And then I started realizing, hey, we can all succeed together. And so when you build that trust, and I'm not saying I'm going to be friends with all of my coworkers.

53:12When you have relationships of trust and respect with people, that is a really good way of making sure eventually, if you have a need, that person is going to be there for you. Like you don't do that in order for them to be there for you. You just, you are a good person. You are a trustworthy person. You build trust and then you will reap the benefits of being a good person. Eventually. That's one thing to don't be afraid to ask every career change I've made. I have never applied for any job on a website. I have always reached out to someone I know. Once you build this relationship of trust with people and you, you know, you're comfortable asking them and be like, hey, there's no pressure.

53:56You can say no if you don't want to, but would you mind just giving me, like doing me a little favor? So don't be a dick, essentially. You know, build trustworthy relationship with people. Don't be afraid to ask, but also don't be afraid to hear no or not hear back from people. People are busy. That's fine. The way you maximize your luck is you maximize, I was reading something the other day about like the surface area for luck. Take more shots. The more shots you take, the more likely you are for one to land. And then the last question I'd like to ask you is if you could go back to yourself when you just graduated college in France and give yourself some advice knowing what you know today, what would you say?

54:37Be a good person. Invest in things that are fun. Invest in your relationship with your coworkers. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day who gets the credit. everyone is going to get credit for something i think early on in my career i was very credit driven be patient you know i think there were a few times in my career where i was pushing for a promo or when i wasn't ready uh my c7 like i said took like a couple of halves to go through and stay curious and mostly just like enjoy it uh you're gonna have an amazing adventure Awesome. Well, thanks so much for sharing your career story with us, Adrian.

55:17And now if you want to share with the audience where people could find you, maybe they can go and I'll put it in the show notes. Sure. At this point, I'm mostly just active on LinkedIn, so we can put my LinkedIn in there. And then, yeah, no plugs. I hope that the audience will get something out of this. Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing this with the community. Thank you so much for having me right. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I don't sell anything or do sponsorships, but if you want to help out with the podcast, you can support by engaging with the content on YouTube or on Spotify.

55:55If you want to drop a review, that'll be super helpful. And if there's any guests that you want to bring on to, please let me know. I feel like sourcing very senior ICs. There's no well studied list out there on Google that I can just search this up. So if there's someone in your org or at your company who you really look up to and you want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll reach out to them.