This story was recorded in March, 2020. Learn more about Keavy 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 principal engineer at Fastly. Fastly is an edge cloud platform that provides services like a CDN. I work in OCTO, the Office of the CTO, which is composed of about ten principal or distinguished engineers who report directly to the CTO. Each member of OCTO tends to have their own focus, and mine is being the API Lead.

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Keavy McMinn shares her experience as a Senior Principal Engineer at Fastly, working in the Office of the CTO as API Lead. She discusses the unique aspects of staff-plus engineering roles, including taking holistic long-term views, advocating for technical decisions through collaboration rather than authority, and the importance of building organizational trust. McMinn emphasizes that her promotion came through changing companies rather than internal advancement, and highlights the value of public speaking, peer networks, and design-first approaches to API development.

Keavy McMinn - Senior Principal Engineer at Fastly