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Steve Mynett

Hi, I'm Steve!

Before starting to build this site, I spent a lot of time making sure I knew why. The world doesn't need another vibe-coded site with thought leadership pieces on Engineering Leadership, especially AI-generated ones. So, why do this? Selfishly, I value the process of taking an abstract thought, testing it, refining it, and turning it into something coherent enough to publish.

I've worked in tech across a variety of teams and roles for over 20 years, and when I'm not working, I love to travel (cliché, I know). When I'm not traveling, I live in Vancouver, BC, with my wife and our dog. On some days I am fairly sure she likes the dog more than me, and I am OK with that.

Steve and Luca.
Self portrait with my dog, Luca.

My path over the years has been meandering by any reasonable definition. I originally went to school for classical music before becoming a professional musician, working primarily in jazz and commercial settings. From there my career unfolded in less predictable ways. As much as I enjoyed being on stage, I started to pursue photography, design, then engineering, engineering management, and eventually incident response.

Most recently I was Head of Incident Response at Chime, working with a team of Incident Commanders responding to hundreds of incidents, working with thousands of employees, for millions of members.

As my thoughts turn to what's next, people often ask "What are you looking for?". For me, I've found a more useful question is "What are you optimizing for?".

I learned a long time ago to be crystal clear about what I want in a job, and equally clear about the order of those priorities.

  1. The people I work with. Both on my immediate team and broadly across the company.
  2. The values of the company. Whether they align with mine, and more importantly, how they show up when things get hard.
  3. What the team is working on. Product delivery, platform engineering, incident response, or other work where I can have meaningful impact.
  4. What the company is building. Ideally, a product that makes the world a little better for the folks who use it.

While there is value in the items at the bottom of the list, I value the items above them more.