The Caring Techie

Founder & CEO - Engineering Leadership Coach

Maven

Learn the mindsets, frameworks, and tools you need to find your voice, make yourself listened to, and have the impact you want at work.

Course Instructor - "Impact through Influence in Engineering Teams"

Mnemonic, Inc

• Bootstrapped the engineering culture and processes
• Managed & coached the early employees
• Partnered with the CEO and Head of Product to create and prioritize the roadmap
• Partnered with the Head of Marketing to define our core value statements
• Delivered key 0 to 1 projects including indexing, data pipelines processing TB of data, high-performing APIs, and billing running on GCP infrastructure

Staff Software Engineer / Engineering Manager

Uber

Feb 2018 - July 2020 Uber Eats - Eater Delivery Experience team
• Led the engineering team responsible with the redesign of the whole delivery experience in the Uber Eats Eater app - project Genie
• Architected a server-driven model-view framework for the delivery experience that provides support for various delivery modalities (over-the-top, pick-up, restaurants providing their couriers)
• Led the cross-organizational effort of integrating maps in the Eater App

Jan 2017 - Feb 2018 Uber Ride Sharing - Marketplace Management
• Led the team that built an event ingestion platform and API to be used for the purpose of Forecasting & Pricing

Staff Software Engineer (former Senior 2) - Tech Lead

Google

Led a cross-organizational team to architect & implement a scalable, server-side dynamic ad insertion engine for MPEG-DASH Linear TV and On-Demand streams for the Google Fiber Mobile TV App (Android and iOS).

Senior Software Engineer - Technical Lead Manager

Google Fiber TV Ads
Developed the distributed backend for dynamic ad insertion on linear TV for Google Fiber Set Top Boxes for serving fully targeted TV ads to Google Fiber customers

Google Fiber Embedded
Developed and troubleshooted embedded software for the in-home routing devices and set top boxes.

AdWords Serving Infrastructure
Features and fixes for live budgeting, experiments and local ad serving.

Software Engineer

Ixia

Developed plug-ins for the IxNetwork product including MLD and IGMP implementations, DHCP server features, and performance improvements.

University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest

Operating Systems Teaching Assistant

Voice System, Romania

Bitdefender

Junior Software Developer (Intern)

I spent the last 14 years of my career in Tech doing hands-on engineering leadership for companies like Google, Uber, and early-stage startups. 

I'm very passionate about helping people shine. Over the last 4 years, I helped hundreds of software engineers and engineering leaders transform their potential into high performance via 1:1 coaching, courses and my writing.

If you're curious about working together, dm me or shoot me an email at thecaringtechie@gmail.com.

In the era of AI-assisted software engineering, expectations have gone up but one thing remains the same - to thrive as an engineer you need to master these 3 non-technical skills:

1. Scaling yourself 

Dealing with a significantly larger scope and increased expectations to make an impact means doubling down on the impact you can have through others.

2. Navigating ambiguity

This requires getting comfortable with dealing with problems involving multiple strategies, interpretations, conflicting requirements, or incomplete specifications. Choosing a solution in these situations involves detective work, risk management, and tradeoffs.

3. Influence

To get anything done, you need influence. Influence is essential whether you’re getting approval from your manager, getting other teams to help you, or convincing your peer to agree with your solution.

To learn the mindsets, frameworks, and tools you need to build influence at work, join the August cohort of my highly-rated course:

https://lnkd.in/gHZ5n3GH

Due to time limitations, this is going to be my final live cohort, so don't miss out!!

♻️ Please repost if you found this useful

Irina Stanescu

Engineering Leader • High Performance Coach in Tech • Ex-Google, Ex-Uber

We’re in the Wild Wild West era of AI dev tools. Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, Claude Code, Windsurf… the list goes on. Many adopted them, but few can measure their impact. Adoption ≠ impact. 

• Where are the productivity gains?
• Which tools deliver ROI?
• Where is adoption adding cost without value?
  
Visibility into AI tools' performance across the software development lifecycle is limited or non-existent.

After analyzing 2M+ PRs, Jellyfish found that:
• AI-assisted PRs jumped from 14% to 51% YoY
• Cycle times dropped ~16%
• Quality held steady

So yes, there are gains. But not evenly. Different tools, different teams, different outcomes.

That’s the blind spot: adoption is easy, impact is hard to measure.

And that’s the gap Jellyfish built 𝗔𝗜 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 to solve: giving leaders a vendor-agnostic view across Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, Amazon Q, Claude Code, Windsurf, and review agents like CodeRabbit, Graphite, and Greptile.

👉 If you’re an engineering leader being asked to prove AI ROI, this is the missing data.

Request a demo to see AI Impact in action: https://lnkd.in/gUCEj_BY

Nothing makes me happier than seeing posts like this. 

Sonja, it was such a joy having you in class. You were an A+ student from start to finish.

I’m really going to miss teaching this course. Watching people grow, gain new tools, and walk away proud of what they’ve learned has been the highlight of my year.

No more cohorts this year, but if you’d like to know when the next one opens, you can join the waitlist here: https://lnkd.in/gHZ5n3GH.

Software Engineering Team Lead at Sympower

Scrolling through linkedIn it sometimes feels like the only reason to do a course is to show off the certificate. 

But this course actually taught me to be mindful about communication. Who are the people that I need to have a relationship with to be able to have impact? How do you structure a conversation, how to not fall in the trap of using only logic. And actually getting to that yes. 

And of course I also want to show off my certificate ;) 

--

I’m happy to share that I’ve obtained a new certification: Impact through Influence in Engineering Teams by Irina Stanescu

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