i'm sarah

I'm currently employed as a Principal Engineer at ProductPlan, and I’m open to full-time, remote opportunities, based in the United States.

I am a generalist with skills across the stack, but my happy place is probably more within backend or architectrually focused specializations. I've never met a problem I wasn't interested in solving (a bit pathological that way) but SaaS, AI and climate tech have the bulk of my attention.

I’m most familiar with Ruby, Javascript, Rails, React, and Typescript. That said, given programming languages are merely tools to solve certain problems, I am open learning new languages if they better suit the problem space you and your team are navigating.

You can see more details in my resume.

• Lead technical projects: I have a long track record of organizing technical problems and teams and delivering value when I say we will, better than I said it could be.
• Lean Validation: Roughly a decade spent building products for product teams has left me deeply aware of the value of strategic and early pairing of a technical contributor with a design and product partner. Rapid prototyping and shipping of minimum delightful products is a superpower of mine.
• Achieve CI/CD and Daily Deploys I have experience developing and delivering migration strategies to get your technical team (and the organization at large) from infrequent deploys to confidently shipping daily.
• Mentorship and Career Development I care deeply about my peeps (past, current and future) and want to see them living their best lives. I have a lot of energy for supporting the growth of my teams, while also shipping lots of stuff together.

I love an organization where thoughtfulness radiates at every level. I like to see this balanced with a willingness to act and decide, extreme ownership of failure (especially amongst the most senior leaders) and enthusiastic delegation and empowerment of team members. I am and love to see servant leaders who act with and expect their teams to act with integrity.

With my deep history of support for product teams of all sizes, product market fit is something I live and breath. Your company should have it or be actively in pursuit of it. If you haven't found it yet and need support, this is an area I can specifically help with.

I like a team that gives a damn. About the business, the product they are building, about the quality of their code, and about each other.

I like to work with brilliant humans with no ego. I love to see technologists be good humans towards each another, great collaborators for their product partners, and pragmatic but courageous in their technical decisions.

I like to see technical decisions paired appropriately with company stage and product maturity. I get excited to hear talented individuals describe their solutions in terms of its strengths AND weaknesses and look for feedback on mitigating downsides.

I've been lucky to work with best-in class technical leaders as my peers for many years. This has helped me hone what I believe makes for a kick-ass engineering leadership group.

• Clarity in speech and purpose
  • Every member of our technical organization should be able to trace the work they do on a daily basis to real, measurable objectives that support the business
• Extreme ownership in failure but energetic recognition of others in successes
  • The easiest thing to get wrong in technical leadership is forgetting to push recognition down to the people sweating day in and day out to build the products our customers use
  • At the same time, I expect generative leaders to be the first to fall on the sword when things go wrong and find ways to fail forward and ensure organizational learning occurs whenever we eat shit
• Strong partners to the business but not at the cost of Engineering core competencies
  • Competency 1: Enable value delivery today (strong SDLC, team metrics, CI/CD, accountability)
  • Competency 2: Ensure we can deliver value tomorrow (debt/infrastructure investment/r&d)

If it sounds like we might be a match, I'd love to chat. Even if you're unsure, please don't hesitate to reach out. I love connecting with and learning about new teams, product spaces, and people. Feel free to email me at sarahjschultz at gmail dot com or use this link to book a 30 minute slot on my calendar.