Karim Fanous - Engineering Management in the Age of AI
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Show Notes
Our Guest: Karim Fanous is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at StrongDM, a cybersecurity company, and the writer behind Cumulative, a Substack focused on engineering management, building startups, and how AI is reshaping the craft of software.
Episode Topics:
- Why VPE is “people + product + processes” and how breakdowns show up as business problems (growth, quality, churn, GTM).
- How “buggy processes” reveal themselves at the exec level through growth stalls, quality pain, churn, and GTM friction?
- Executive interview questions that reveal whether an engineering leader can connect engineering to business reality.
- The common scaling fallacy: doubling engineers does not double output.
- “AI made us faster… not necessarily better”: how AI boosts strong engineers, but used carelessly amplifies technical debt.
- Why human review won’t scale in an agent-driven world and why software will need machine verification to move at “GPU speed.”?
- Engineering shifts toward architecture, integration, trade-offs, experiments, and validation.
- The “10x engineer” debate in the AI era.
- AI security risks: non-deterministic systems + autonomous actions require controls beyond RBAC.
- Inside StrongDM’s approach on agents treated like coworkers with identities, visibility, and feedback that improves behavior.
Resources:
https://www.cummulative.io/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karimfan
https://www.strongdm.com/
https://www.cummulative.io/p/ai-agents-are-here-security-isnt
https://www.cummulative.io/p/preparing-for-a-world-where-humans
https://www.cummulative.io/p/how-do-you-interview-a-vp-of-engineering
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