“You don't sell the deal — you design the situation where the deal is the obvious next step.”
Vikram Haridas, Principal Engineer
- 01
Describe the most significant change to your role in 2025.
Principal engineering here used to mean setting standards and reviewing designs. It still means that, but now I also own the agent governance layer — the rules, the checkpoints, the override protocols that determine what an agentic system can do without human sign-off. That's new. Nobody had a playbook for it. I'm writing ours.
- 02
What does it mean to operate alongside agents in your function?
I think of agents as junior engineers with infinite patience and no common sense. They'll implement exactly what you spec, including the parts you didn't realize were ambiguous. My job is to make the spec unambiguous — to think three steps ahead about what the agent will interpret literally when I meant it loosely. That's a different cognitive skill than traditional system design.
- 03
What do you wish you'd known before joining?
That the interesting problems here are not greenfield. They're migration problems — moving a system with eight years of accumulated behavior into an agentic operating model without breaking what works. If you've only done net-new architecture, the constraint-driven problem space takes some adjustment. It's harder and more interesting than I expected.
See open seats.
Building across engineering, product, data, sales, ops, finance, and people. Every role is an Operator role.
We get people offline through quality local experiences at great value. That's still the mission. Everything above is what it takes to deliver it in 2026.