Notes on hiring a Foundation Eng leader.

I’ve recently had a few folks reach out for advice on hiring a Foundation Engineering leader based on my supporting that organization at Stripe. The first challenge with the question is defining what “Foundation Engineering” even means!

I joined Stripe to work with the “Sys” engineering group, which was short for “Systems,” and there were about thirty folks in Sys within the larger infrastructure organization that had… maybe sixty folks working across data, developer tools, financial infrastruct...