Engineering leadership from inside real teams.
Level-up Engineering talks with technology leaders about the practical side of building and running engineering organizations. Recent conversations move from Tinder infrastructure and Fleetio growth to remote-work habits, customer-centric product design, analytics teams, DAOs, and leadership at Prezi.
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Level-up Engineering is a technology leadership interview show centered on how engineering organizations actually operate. Karolina Toth frames the conversations around teams, product choices, business needs, and the everyday habits that help or hurt delivery. The show’s recent run gives it a broad but coherent shape. One conversation with Chris O'Brien from Tinder looks at infrastructure, reliability, and the experience of working on big-company technical problems inside a smaller engineering organization. Another with Richard Young at Fleetio brings scaling into view through support work, customer contact, hiring, and the appeal of reducing technical debt as a company grows. Remote work gets serious attention through Liam, whose examples focus on async communication, meeting discipline, synchronous connection, and the difference between sharing information and using live time well. Ian Thien discusses customer-centric design through reviews, going well and not going well reflections, next actions, and company-wide narrative updates. Gil Prosa brings product development and agile leadership back to mindset, principles, tactics, and intentional ways of working. Gopal Erinjipurat connects analytics engineering with hiring, curiosity, climate-related data, team DNA, and outcome-driven measures. The 1inch Network episode adds a decentralized autonomous organization angle, with Sergej Kunz discussing DAOs, DeFi, Ethereum, liquidity sources, and the path from hackathons to building 1inch. A Prezi conversation places leadership growth inside a product-and-engineering role. Across these episodes, the show keeps returning to a core question: how do engineering leaders make technical work, customer value, and team health move in the same direction? Its strongest material comes from the specific practices guests name, such as support work, async preparation, monthly reviews, and explicit leadership principles. The register is warm but businesslike. The pacing leaves room for biography, then moves toward practical examples. Level-up Engineering is useful discovery listening for people comparing how different technology companies organize engineering work.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants practical engineering-management ideas from company leaders, especially around team scaling, product delivery, remote work, and technical leadership.
What sets it apart: The show sets broad leadership themes beside concrete operating habits: support work, async meeting rules, monthly reviews, hiring signals, and infrastructure decisions. It also reaches beyond standard management talk into DAOs, DeFi, analytics engineering, and climate-related data work.
Level-Up Engineering brings you actionable management insights straight from top tech leaders. Each episode tackles real challenges faced by engineering managers—like hiring, motivating teams, and scaling organizations—and shares how they have navigated them.Discover best practices in management and leadership to master the art of understanding people and organizations, just as well as you understand code.Brought to you by **Apex Lab**, a software development agency creating stress-free, expert-led digital products. Tune in to level up your skills and take your team to new heights! Learn more at [apexlab.io](https://www.apexlab.io/).Got feedback or want to be featured on **Level-Up Engineeri…
Friday support duty is the customer empathy lesson you might actually take back to your team.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded Tinder infrastructure conversation about reliability, customer needs, business needs, and engineering growth.
Level Up Engineering follows Tinder engineering leader Chris O'Brien into the practical questions behind cloud infrastructure, reliability, and scale.
Richard Young connects Fleetio's growth with low technical debt, customer proximity, and fast feedback.
Fleetio's growth story lands best through the habits Richard Young describes from his more than nine years at the company. As Principal Software Engineer, he ties low technical debt to easier hiring and stronger engineering scale, then grounds that idea in Support Chief, the…
A grounded case for remote work as communication design, where meetings have to earn their place.
Remote work is framed as an engineered operating system, not a laptop perk. Liam, a founder of technology companies focused on remote and distributed work, describes a setup where synchronous time is saved for connection, disagreement, and deeper relationships, while agreed…
A grounded episode on using a monthly operating view to turn team reflection into shared next actions.
Ian Thien centers the episode on a monthly operating view that helps teams name what is working, what is not, and what action should come next.
A grounded conversation on why modern practices fall short when leaders skip the mindset behind them.
Modern product-development habits can lose their force when organizations copy rituals before deciding how they actually want to work. Level Up Engineering gives that problem a practical frame through Karolina Toth's conversation with Gil Prosa, a value delivery and agile…
Metaverse shop talk from the inside.
Theory for the internet’s unsettled edge.
Builder stories from crypto’s live edge.
A BitClout builder's interviews and solo talks, collected.
Karolina Toth of Level-up Engineering interviews Tinder Director of Engineering Chris O'Brien about building a new engineering team and turning around an older operations group.
Karolina Toth talks with Richard Young, Fleetio’s Principal Software Engineer, about how a small engineering team scaled a fleet-management startup without losing customer focus.
["On Level Up Engineering, Karolina Toth interviews Liam, founder of Time Doctor, staff.com, and Running Remote, about why he thinks remote work is still increasing.", "Liam says U.S.
On Level Up Engineering, Karolina Toth interviews Ian Thien, who says his path ran from Microsoft Office and about a dozen patents to Mattermost.
Karolina Toth opens Level Up Engineering with Gil Prosa, a Toronto-based value delivery and agile leadership expert, to ask why product development still falls short.
At Adobe Romania, senior engineering manager Magda Mio built Mentor Her after women in the Bucharest office asked for women mentors.
At Recurve, Dave Yeager says a healthy engineering culture depends on vulnerability, where people can admit mistakes and learn from them.
Interview with a CTO about building successful engineering teams for analytics in a climate tech startup.
Interview with Sergej Kunz, co-founder of One Inch Network, discussing how to start a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
An interview with Jose Roca, VP of Engineering at Prezi, discussing his leadership journey and insights on managing engineering teams.
Interview with Camille Fournier, Managing Director at Two Sigma, discussing leading platform engineering teams.