Engineer for the future of Cloud
June 10-13, 2019
San Jose, CA

Navigating the midcareer plateau

Uma Chingunde (Stripe)
2:20pm–3:00pm Thursday, June 13, 2019
Leadership
 Location: LL20 A/B
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 10 ratings)
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Who is this presentation for?

  • Engineers or managers trying to plan their career, particularly ones at the midcareer stage

Level

Intermediate

What you'll learn

  • Explore strategies for career planning for midcareer technologists

Description

As both engineers and managers reach midcareer levels referred to as career or terminal levels (e.g., senior engineer or senior manager levels in many technology companies), they are often faced with uncertainty and ambiguity on possible next steps in their career.

Drawing on her experience supporting engineers and managers through career growth in environments ranging from large company environments to startups, Uma Chingunde offers strategies to think about careers at this stage. She addresses some questions such as, How do you think of your career goal outside of the usual career ladders? How do these change as you get more senior? What are traditional versus nontraditional IC and manager paths you can explore? How do you think about the engineer versus manager track? What are some variations on the above for underrepresented groups?

Photo of Uma Chingunde

Uma Chingunde

Stripe

Uma Chingunde leads the compute organization at Stripe, a team within the company’s larger infrastructure organization that supports all Stripe engineers and customers by providing a reliable and scalable platform. Uma started her career in the distributed systems space, working on key virtual machine technology at VMware as an engineer and then manager. Previously, she was an engineering manager at Delphix, supporting the core teams building the Delphix virtual appliance. She has a master’s degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.