Story recorded in March, 2020. Learn more about Joy on her blog, Twitter, and Linkedin.
Tell us a little about your current role: your title, the company you work at, and generally what sort of work does your team do?
I’m a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Split.io, working on the backend of what we call the COE team. Split is a feature flagging and experimentation framework. We focus on enabling our customers to separate deployment and release in CI/CD and also enabling A/B testing. My team is responsible for most of the main business logic of our web application, including everything from data storage to the APIs. There is a separate team that focuses on the experimentation side, including all of the detailed statistics that goes into that, so we’re able to focus more on the main platform.

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Joy Ebertz shares her journey as a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Split, focusing on feature flagging and experimentation platforms. She emphasizes that staff-level roles involve setting technical vision, facilitating team alignment, and taking ownership of broader problems rather than just coding. Key insights include the importance of amplifying personal strengths over fixing weaknesses, gaining visibility through contributions like API standards committees, and understanding that senior roles require strong communication and persuasion skills alongside technical expertise.

Joy Ebertz - Senior Staff Software Engineer at Split