Exploring The AI-Engineering Career Path with Leopard Alumni
Hi everyone 💛 I think we’ve all been thinking a lot about how the engineering role is changing, not just incrementally, but structurally. We’re in a moment where engineers are expected to be 3–5x more productive, but the career path around that productivity game is totally up in the air.
Hopefully, this will work out long term for the software engineering community. I hope there are more roles where creativity, problem solving and leverage is prioritized, and engineers are les bogged down by debugging and tech debt.
But even in that best case scenario, the question remains:
What does an AI-forward engineering career actually look like? ... and how do you carve out your role as the landscape keeps evolving?
We’ll dig into some of the trends we’re seeing:
Software Engineers are now AI Engineers. Is AI Engineering just the new baseline expectation for senior engineers? It’s the fastest growing role in the Leopard marketplace. We’ll get into what that role means to each of our panelists, and how their role has changed over time.
Ai Engineering is all about Leverage. The engineers who are AI-forward aren’t just generating code faster, they’re planning better. They define work clearly enough, act like the product owner and executor, and run multiple agents in parallel. We’ll talk through how our panelists have been able to scale themselves with AI tools in their day to day.
On small/lean teams, AI Engineering is even more important. Because small companies have more greenfield work (new product, core features, new features, new infrastructure), are designing & managing systems & tools as much as they’re writing code. We’ll discuss: what could this career path look like?
We'll also ask our panelists the following:
How has your day to day changed in the last few years?
What specific leverage have you gained from AI tools at the Staff or Lead level?
How does AI change your role on a small team? Where do you see the biggest gains & growing pains?
Would you describe your role as a “product manager of agents?” What does that really really means in practice
How has AI shifted your own career path? Has it expanded your scope or changed what seniority looks like?
How can Leopard members can intentionally position themselves to land and succeed in these kind of roles?
Let me introduce our amazing panelists:
Waverly Mandel waverly-mandel
Staff Engineer, Brisk Teaching
Waverly Mandel is a Staff Software Engineer with over a decade of experience building front-end and full-stack web applications in JavaScript. She’s currently focused on AI-native product development at Brisk Teaching (via Leopard!), where she works on AI-powered tools designed to support educators through large language model integrations. Before Brisk, Waverly held staff and senior engineering roles at companies like Rivian and Lattice, where she worked across growth, engagement, and AI initiatives. Her background spans micro-frontend architecture, data systems, distributed APIs, and large-scale web platforms.
This panel was really her idea :) This new model of senior engineering: deeply technical, product-oriented, and fluent in AI tooling, operating less as a ticket executor and more as a designer of systems and workflows.
Bridget Went bridgetwent
Founding Fullstack Engineer, Lanai
Bridget Went is a Founding Fullstack Engineer at Lanai, where she’s helping build the product and engineering foundation from the ground up. Before Lanai, Bridget was a Staff Software Engineer at Material Security (via Leopard!), where she led the SPA team and helped maintain the core infrastructure behind their email security product. Before that, she spent over six years at Okta, including as a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead. Now, as a founding engineer at an early-stage startup,
This panel is also Bridget’s idea :) We were chatting about how she’s using so many AI tools and building from scratch in her new role, and I thought her experience was worth sharing with you all.
Safia Abdalla safiaabdalla
Software Engineer, Warp
Safia Abdalla just joined the team at Warp as a Software Engineer (via Leopard!), where she’s helping build the platform for coding with agents. Before Warp, Safia spent over seven years at Microsoft, most recently as a Principal Software Engineer. Her career has consistently centered on building tools and frameworks that make other engineers more productive; she helped design and ship major pieces of the .NET ecosystem, and served on on the C# Language Design Committee, contributing to decisions that shape how millions of developers write software.
Safia’s current company, Warp, now sits at the forefront of developer tooling in an AI-native world, so her work is helping thousands of engineers to orchestrate and scale coding agents across environments.
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