Leading clinic and platform teams

When I joined Seer in 2017, the whole company was about ten people. As it grew into a regulated medtech business running clinics across Australia, its software needed real teams around it, and those teams needed leading.

I moved into engineering management in 2020, after three years building Seer's web app myself.

I hired the whole Seer-Clinic product team, the team that owned the tools Seer's clinics ran on, and sat on the hiring panel for more than ten engineers in all. I onboarded and trained the people who joined my teams, and kept mentoring them as they grew in their careers.

I led the Seer-Clinic team for three years, with three to five engineers reporting to me. I did the technical planning and ran delivery, and I worked to build a team that was efficient, inclusive and collaborative. I also stayed hands-on, contributing to the code as an equal member of the team.

In 2023 I became senior engineering manager and took on Seer's two platform teams, API and DevOps, as well. That made about 11 reports across three teams. I led cross-team projects and made sure they delivered real value to the business and finished on time. I also ran migrations to Next.js and PostGraphile, and worked to get other teams to adopt them.

It was a hard stretch for the company too. I learned how to guide teams through change, work through conflict, and keep things steady when much around them wasn't.

One engineer on my teams was promoted from mid-level to senior. The Seer-Clinic team I hired owned the tools that ran Seer's clinics day to day.

When Seer scaled back in 2024, I went back to hands-on work as a staff engineer, looking after the product and its integrations across the stack.