After 5 years as Head of Engineering at epilot, I'm switching my title to Distinguished Engineer.
Vlad becomes the sole Head of Engineering. He's been running most of the role for close to a year anyway, since we announced him as my Co-Head back in July 2025. Time to make it official.
This isn't a step away from the job. I'm still leading. I'm still in our engineering leadership meetings. I'm still committed to epilot's long game. The title change is about clarifying what my work looks like in 2026 so that it stops getting in the way of Vlad owning the HOE role outright.
Quick recap of how we got here.
A brief history
I joined epilot in October 2020 as a cloud engineer and took over as Head of Engineering in May 2021. We were about 10 in-house engineers. Our product was a Java monolith built on a 3rd-party low-code platform we didn't even own the source code to.
My job: build better software, faster.
The first few years were heavy on technical and people leadership. I wrote our first Engineering Principles, introduced RFCs, established our weekly product demos, and championed the 360 plan to rewrite the entire product on serverless AWS with microfrontends.
I led the original 360 strike team and drove the new architecture from the front. We killed the legacy platform. We managed to grow MRR fast while migrating customers. Today we ship 150+ times a week to production. The in-house engineering team has grown from 10 to over 40 senior product engineers from more than 10 countries. No management layer. No platform team. No ops team.
I took pride in keeping our headcount relatively low. Raise the bar, hire fewer, expect more out of each. Product Engineer Mindset.
I introduced Salary Fairness reviews, ran our remote-first engineer hiring round after round, and built up most of what now just feels like "how we do things" at epilot.
The shift
As the foundation got solid and the team filled out with great people, I drifted back to where I enjoy my work the most: building great products and helping others do the same.
My last 3 major initiatives have all been about spinning up teams to eliminate specific business bottlenecks:
- Blueprints, Apps & Marketplace
- ERP integrations with Dinero
- AI adoption inside the company: building the tools to safely open up our product and codebase for agents and non-engineers to start contributing
I was never a great people manager
I'll just say it. I was never great at the people manager part of the job.
I've always hated 1:1s and review discussions, which is why I barely do them anymore.
Vlad has been handling most of the people side since July 2025, when we announced him as my Co-Head of Engineering. He's better at this than I am. The team has felt the difference. So much that I want him to own the title outright instead of sharing it with me.
What I'll keep doing
Same as before. Scaling Entity API & Elastic. Integrations, CI Pipelines, Docs, Performance. Figuring out how to use AI better.
ERP integrations with Dinero are still a big bet for MRR. They open up customer segments we can't really reach without them.
AI adoption is where most of my creative energy goes right now. Building the tools, guardrails and workflows that let PMs, designers, customer success folks, and in the future our partners and customers, extend epilot with AI. Engineers then take those drafts the rest of the way to production.
I haven't been this excited about a problem since 360.
I'll keep joining our engineering leadership meetings as Distinguished Engineer alongside the other engineering leaders. Same seat at the table, less fancy title, just more clearly working from the trenches.
This is not me going pure IC. I'm still leading, still running the team solving ERP integrations, still making bets that shape where epilot goes.
Why Distinguished Engineer
Because it matches what I do.
It also sets the right expectation for new joiners. New engineers often expect a Head of Engineering to play a more people-focused role than I have any interest in playing. That mismatch confuses everyone, distracts from real product work, and gets in the way of Vlad owning the HOE role.
A Distinguished Engineer at epilot is someone who:
- Has been here long enough to have built a strong internal track record
- Has their hands on the product
- Leads through example
That's the job I want to keep doing.
Leaving the door open
I'd also like Distinguished Engineer to stay open as a title for other long-tenured engineer leaders at epilot with exceptional track records to grow into.
If you've been here for years, shipped things people still rely on, and want to keep your hands on the product without taking the people-management track, this is what that path can look like.
We're going to need a few of these.
🦄 Thank God it's Friday!
— Viljami