Why 1 Good UX Is Worth 5 Engineers w/ Toast's Director of Engineering Brad Pielech

**Brad Pielech** (0:00)
Look, Toast, we have hundreds of microservices, dozens of engineering teams, hundreds of deployments a week. Toast moves really, really quickly here.
But the user experience team at Toast keeps a lot of that together. Common language, common design patterns, common approach, good handoffs between areas.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
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**Dan Lines** (0:37)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Brad Pielech, Director of Engineering at Toast.
Brad, thanks for joining us and congrats on the IPO last year.

**Brad Pielech** (0:52)
Thanks Dan, really glad to be here. Been a long time listening to the podcast. Really appreciated the content you put out there and I'm so pleased that I got a chance to participate today and talk about a number of topics of interest. And yeah, the IPO is a big deal for us. A lot of people worked a lot of years on this.
Got to a really great stage in our journey and there's so much more ahead of Toast.

**Dan Lines** (1:11)
Yeah, that's so cool. That's awesome that you were there and got to the stage. Now for our listeners, you and I, we go back a little bit. We're friends, you know, off the pod. We worked together at CloudLock.
I remember hiring you or bringing you in very early on in the core engineering team, I would say, of CloudLock. Does that sound about right to you?

**Brad Pielech** (1:34)
Yeah, we're actually coming up on a 10-year anniversary, Dan. You know that?
I was thinking about it. I don't know what you're going to get me this year for, but I believe I was hired in about May of 2012

**Dan Lines** (1:43)
Yep.

**Brad Pielech** (1:45)
And yeah, I remember where initially, I think when I was interviewing, you were not a manager. And then by the time I'd given notice and joining, you had just moved into management or a team lead.

**Dan Lines** (1:57)
Yep.

**Brad Pielech** (1:57)
I think it was actually your first hire. I still remember the first time I met you, and I was like, hey, what's going on, Brad? Big handshake and super familiar.
Like, who is this, this guy? Like, it's really great to see, you know, sort of how we've each grown and where our careers have taken in the last 10 years.

**Dan Lines** (2:13)
Yeah, I mean, so when you're at a startup, you get all of that opportunity. You can be individual contributor, then you get to be a team leader really fast. If you get the opportunity, I remember when we brought you in thinking like, wow, our talent level is going up now. We're getting some seriously good engineers.
And your career, I think, is really interesting, which I wanna let you give a little background on. But the thing that I think is interesting is like, you're a phenomenal engineer.
And then you went a little bit into like the CTO team and building relationships and using both engineering and kind of, I would say, soft skills. Can you give kind of a proper background on your career?

**Brad Pielech** (2:56)
Yeah, sure, Dan, happy to walk through. So, you know, I think that in a lot of ways on the embodiment of our French Charity major's engineering pendulum, pendulum between management and individual contributing.
So my first eight years, you know, sort of going up from software engineer two up to lead software engineer at a defense contractor. At that point, I sort of felt like, well, management is the way to go. That's the way to get ahead in your career. So I went and did a stint as a manager of web development for a couple of years, grew the team, you know, from two or three up to about eight or so, took on an architect role there, and then said, okay, I did my two years. I want to go back and work in engineering. Showing CloudLock with you. I remember the opportunities we had, the growth that was going on. And a couple of times in the path, you know, you're like, do you want to go back to the management or do you want to stay in the tech side of things?
And, you know, rode the tech side of things to a gig in the CTO team, you know, stayed on there through acquisition, hired a couple of folks to sort of amplify what I was working on. And then I moved over to Toast fall of 2019