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Keavy McMinn - Senior Principal Engineer at Fastly

Tell us a little about your current role: your title, the company you work at, and generally the sort of work your team does?

I'm a senior principal engineer at Fastly. Fastly is an edge cloud platform that provides services like a CDN. I work in OCTO, the Office of the CTO, which is composed of about ten principal or distinguished engineers who report directly to the CTO. Each member of OCTO tends to have their own focus, and mine is being the API Lead.

What does a Staff-plus engineer do at your company? How do you spend your time?

There are several quite different types of principal and distinguished engineers in OCTO. There are also principal engineers that work within engineering teams directly, rather than within OCTO. In the OCTO group, some work on internet standards or academic research, some do deep technical research and prototyping, some help incubate a team building something completely new. I'm closely involved with the broader engineering organization in my API Lead role.

We all work on different things, but we have a common goal of taking a holistic, long-term and system-wide view on things. We also try to find and help with the sort of things across engineering that might get overlooked or fall between the cracks. Our CTO supports our work, but doesn't identify the projects to work on, that's up to us.

I've never thought about my time in terms of percentages. Some of my work goes in phases, with more of one thing this week, more of that the next. A massive amount of my time is spent doing written work, research, and talking to people. I'll have regular meetings with the teams and managers that build APIs. I'll spend time breaking a long-term strategy into little chunks, doing research, and writing a proposal on that. Then I'll have to market that proposal around the company. Less on writing code lately, but in other phases I'll build demos or tooling to support the wider work. That coding work is still really enjoyable.

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