This week, I started a new gig: as a Staff Software Engineer1 at Vanta. My role — at least, right out of the gate — is focused on overall developer productivity in the company’s TypeScript monorepo, covering both front- and back-end considerations.
Vanta is an interesting company for me. The pitch is simple: make compliance — with frameworks like SOC2, HIPAA, ISO27001, and so on — easier, less expensive, and more reliable and meaningful. On its face, “compliance with regulatory frameworks” doesn’t sound particularly compelling unless you’re a certain kind of nerd, I think. But that pitch is aimed at a bigger picture goal: “to secure the internet and protect consumer data”. And that’s a goal I am extremely on board with. It’s the exact example I have used in explaining to people why I care about ratchets, not levers in the software industry.
I have joked with friends and colleagues for years that my next job needed to be at the roughly 1,000-person company scale, because my history of company sizes to date had all been at different orders of magnitude. In order:
- ~100,000
- ~10
- 1
- ~100
- ~10,000
Notably missing: the “1000” bucket. Well, time to check that one off: Vanta is in that exact ballpark and growing fast. Hypergrowth is a funny word, but it probably applies here. That means a new set of challenges and opportunities. It’s a fun prospect to take everything I have learned since the last time I was at a startup (as a much-earlier career engineer at Olo
In my Next: Role post in late 2023, I described a hoped-for role for myself that would involve moving the industry forward by building a ratchet that would level up the whole industry (to whatever tiny degree any individual person can, of course). I spent much of 2024 looking for that next role, but I also spent much of 2024 doing that role. My work on The Rust Programming Language book was exactly that, and I think it will make a real difference for people learning Rust and therefore for Rust adoption. In a real way, I was doing that job while I was looking for that job — though I didn’t realize that clearly until late 2024.
This role at Vanta is a bit different than that. There’s no big open source component to it — at least: not yet! We’ll see in the long term. There’s no direct developer story beyond Vanta. But that’s okay: there is a big developer story within Vanta, and Vanta itself is a product I think matters. Different stops along the way in a career not only can but should have different shapes, different emphases, different outcomes. I’m excited and curious to see where this one goes.
Onward!
Notes
Titles are weird. At LinkedIn, I was a Senior Staff Software Engineer, but LinkedIn’s leveling system doesn’t really match the most common/default leveling scheme, so this is about the same. ↩︎