How to Scale Engineering Processes w/ Twitter's VP of Engineering

**Maria Gutierrez** (0:00)
And I remember one day hearing somebody is like, oh, don't worry, if there's a problem with this code, Maria will catch it before she pushes to production. And that was a huge waking up call for me. What have I been doing? This is terrible. I am a huge bottleneck. And that was the day that I was like, okay, we're gonna invest in our pipeline.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:18)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Accelerate your development pipeline with data-driven engineering metrics, continuous improvement automation, and project visibility while cutting your software development cycle time in half. Sign up for your free demo at linearb.io and mention the Dev Interrupted Podcast discount for one month free when you sign up for an annual Pro membership. This is Conor Bronsdon, Dev Interrupted Community Leader and producer of the Dev Interrupted Podcast. You might recognize me from a few ads around here.
What you're about to hear is our first effort, live episode of the Dev Interrupted Podcast, broadcast during our Interact Conference on September 30th. We'll be doing another live podcast during our Interact 2 Conference on February 3rd, 2022 We hope to see you all there. In the meantime, send us in your questions and suggestions for the podcast, and we'll be trying to answer all of them in upcoming episodes.
Thanks for listening.

**Dan Lines** (1:07)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined for our live Interact Podcast episode with Maria Gutierrez, VP of Engineering at Twitter.
Maria, thanks for joining us.

**Maria Gutierrez** (1:22)
It's a pleasure to be here, Dan.

**Dan Lines** (1:24)
Yeah, awesome to have you here. I'm super excited.
One of the ways, my favorite ways to get things going, our audience can get to know you a little bit better, is to understand your career journey. How did you actually get to be the VP of Engineering at Twitter? What did that look like for you coming up in your career path?

**Maria Gutierrez** (1:46)
It has been a very interesting career path and not a very traditional one, I would say. I have been an engineer for 21 years now.
I have worked at different types of companies, public and private, really big and really small, co-located, distributed. So I'm very successful, so not so much.
But I actually studied journalism when I was in Spain, which is where I'm originally from. But after moving to Edinburgh in Scotland in the year 2000, I decided to go back to university. And that's when I started learning software engineering. And halfway through the course, I was very lucky to get an internship at a financial institution here in Edinburgh. And after three months, they offered me a full-time job with a graduate position. And I took it because I thought, oh, I might never get a job again in this. You never know. But back in the day, it was very difficult to tell how things were going to go. So I decided to finish my postgraduate diploma part-time while working. So that's a very kind of not traditional way to get it started. Sometimes I call it the original bootcamp. Back in the day when there wasn't bootcamps, it's just this career complete transition.
And then I moved to a smaller games company where I had the opportunity to work in all aspects of building software from kind of requirement, gathering all the way to supporting production systems. And that's where I feel I really learned kind of the craft. I worked with a really great small team of engineers that were all brilliant. And I was really able to learn how to build software end to end. A few years later, had the opportunity to join the Adobe Developer Technologies team in Edinburgh. At Adobe, I worked on building the system that enabled you to extend creative suite products. And back then it was a big deal because with those extensions, you could add new functionality to create a suite products out of release cycle. And when I'm talking back when you got a CD to get your creative suite, and there was 18 to 24 months kind of release cycles between the different versions. So it was really exciting that we could actually get changes done out of cycle and people could do new things with those products. But the real interesting part back then was I love that I got to work with a lot of customers internally and externally that were trying to leverage that functionality.
And that's what I consider to start my career in management again.
But I wasn't quite sure. I still wanted to be an individual contributor. So I stayed as an individual contributor until I did the change to working at LivingSocial. And from that kind of moving to LivingSocial is where when my management career started after having my son, Ethan. So I was commuting back and forward from home to the office. And I was feeling not great about leaving my little baby at home. So I decided to take a job remotely, fully remotely for a company in Washington, DC working from Edinburgh.