GoodLeap does loans for residential solar. It went from startup to multi-billion-dollar company while I was there, and the engineering team roughly tripled.
A lead engineer owns a whole area (for me, the frontend) and answers for it, still reporting directly to the CTO. Day to day that meant:
- Setting the technical direction: how the frontend was structured, which tools we used, what “good” looked like.
- Hiring, onboarding, and mentoring engineers as the team tripled.
- Deciding what got fixed now vs. later: which problems were worth solving properly right away, and which we could live with for another quarter.
- Rewriting the early foundation (a lot of it originally mine) so forty engineers could work in it without stepping on each other, while the product kept shipping.
Promoted into this from Full Stack Founding Engineer, the role before it.
Left for Confluent. GoodLeap was around 100 people at the time, and I wanted to see how a much larger company (Confluent was roughly 3,000) worked. Confluent had also just IPO’d, and having public stock as part of my compensation mattered to me at that point.