greg mundy
I am a director of engineering. For about fifteen years I have been building software and, more recently, building the teams that build it. My path ran the usual way: backend engineer, then senior, then the slow realization that the problems I cared about most were rarely the technical ones.
I got into computers as a teenager at Jamaica College, on a lab machine that booted slower than it ran. The thing that hooked me has not changed: the feeling of a system going from confusing to obvious once you find the right shape for it. Most of my career has been chasing that feeling and trying to hand it to other people.
These days I think mostly about leverage. A good abstraction, a clear written decision, a team that trusts each other: each one pays out for years. I write here about the parts of that work that do not fit neatly on a resume.
How I lead
I lead by setting context and then getting out of the way. My job is to make sure the team knows why the work matters, what good looks like, and where the edges are, and then to remove the things slowing them down. I would rather over-communicate intent and under-specify implementation. The people closest to the code usually have the better answer; my job is to make sure they have the room and the information to find it.
How I work
I work in writing. Decisions go in documents, not in my head or in a meeting that three people remember three different ways. I am biased toward small, reversible steps, and toward shipping something real early enough to be wrong about it cheaply. I am suspicious of process that exists to make managers feel informed, and fond of process that exists to make engineers feel unblocked.
Right now
Right now I am a director of engineering at Hometap, where I lead several teams and spend most of my time on the unglamorous multipliers: hiring well, keeping the roadmap honest, and protecting the conditions that let good engineers do their best work.
Outside of work
Outside of work I run a small fleet of local language models on Apple Silicon, mostly as an excuse to build tooling for them. I am slowly teaching my kids that a computer is something you are allowed to take apart.