A seven-person engineering team now ships what 80 to 120 engineers used to. Each engineer manages AI agents instead of people, flattening hierarchy and shifting hiring toward seniors. The catch: seniors get buried reviewing AI code, so teams are reworking how work gets divided.
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How has AI changed the structure of your team?
Uh, we're only like a 7-person team. I would probably say we have the output of like 80 to 120 engineers. Wow. Um, but we have tremendous structure built in.
We do better, uh, security scanning for those codes, right? Automated, uh, quality checks. We've sped up our pipelines for delivery and we, we really sped up our own product delivery. On top of that, we've embedded more intelligence into our products so to make them easier to use. And that's really going to be table stakes for everybody going forward, right? Your products need to be as accessible as possible to the broadest audience. They need automated migration tools from any competitors, that sort of thing. They need more intelligence to help you operate them effectively. So we build all of that stuff in now.
So our team is now much flatter and also smaller than it would have been for the same kind of level of output that we have. So we kind of think of every engineer as now being like a mini manager of their agents and their fleet of agents. And we just don't need as many engineers to be able to produce what we're doing. We're also hiring more senior engineers versus junior engineers than we maybe otherwise would have.
We're really trying to figure out how to make it so our most senior engineers still can make sure the system we're building is as it is, but they're not overloaded and actually spending, you know, 99% of their time just reviewing the junior engineers' AI-generated code. They actually have time to contribute themselves. So really what we've had to do is restructure our team or structure how folks work to make sure things are much more evenly balanced. Before, most senior engineers could review a good chunk of code and still have time to contribute as well. We're having to shift things a little bit to make sure that their time is more well-defended.
In my team, we were able to actually, you know, make junior engineers, you know, progress to senior engineers senior levels faster, right? So we are really utilizing AI as a learning and the talent development tool, and this has been very, very impactful, you know, because, you know, this career progression can in some cases happen faster.
