SE Radio 731: Sonali Varde on AI and the Engineering Manager Role

SE Radio 731: Sonali Varde on AI and the Engineering Manager Role

Author: SE-Radio Team July 30, 2026 Duration: 50:50
Sonali Varde, Senior Software Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss how AI is changing the role of the engineering manager. They explore how AI is showing up in day-to-day management work, including operational reviews, planning, communication, workflow automation, and preparation for leadership discussions. The conversation looks at how engineering teams are adopting AI tools and agents, what kinds of skills and practices are becoming more important, and how managers can think about context, review, testing, and operational rigor as AI-assisted development becomes more common. They also discuss how AI affects coaching, performance conversations, hiring, onboarding, team composition, and collaboration with peers and leadership. The episode considers both the opportunities and limits of AI for engineering management, with attention to human judgment, curiosity, ownership, and the continuing importance of technical and organizational understanding.

For developers who think deeply about their craft, Software Engineering Radio-The Podcast for Professional Software Developers offers a steady, thoughtful conversation about building software. This isn't about chasing headlines or quick tips; it's a deliberate exploration of the principles, patterns, and hard-won insights that define lasting work in the field. The SE-Radio Team creates each episode as original, standalone content, ensuring you get focused depth rather than recycled conference talks. Every ten days, a new installment arrives, alternating between detailed tutorial-style deep dives on specific technologies or methodologies and candid interviews with influential voices and practitioners from across the industry. Tuning in means joining a continuous learning journey where complex topics are broken down with clarity, from system architecture and language design to team dynamics and career development. This podcast serves as a reliable educational archive, a resource you can return to as your experience grows, always anchored in the realities and challenges faced by professional developers every day.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Podcast Episodes
SE Radio 727: Jeroen Janssens and Thijs Nieuwdorp on Using Polars [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:16
Jeroen Janssens, Head of Developer Relations at Posit, and Thijs Nieuwdorp, a developer relations engineer at Polars, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Polars, a Python package for transforming, analyzing, and…
SE Radio 726: Scott Kingsley on the Swagger Ecosystem [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:30
Scott Kingsley, a VP of Engineering at SmartBear, speaks with host Gregory Kapfhammer about the Swagger ecosystem. They discuss the user interface, editor, and Swagger CodeGen and how these tools support the creation and…
SE Radio 725: Danny Yang and Sam Goldman on the Pyrefly Type Checker [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:51
Danny Yang and Sam Goldman, both Software Engineers at Meta, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Rust-based Pyrefly type checker for Python. After a look at the foundational concepts for annotating and checki…
SE Radio 723: Dave Airlie on Linux Kernel Maintenance [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:09:27
Dave Airlie, a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Linux kernel maintenance. After over-viewing the scale and structure of the Linux kernel, they dive deep into the review and…
SE Radio 721: Rob Moffat on Risk-First Software Development [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:31
In this episode, Rob Moffat, author of Risk-First Software Development and chief technical architect at the FinTech Open Source Software Foundation (FINOS), speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how all of software dev…
SE Radio 720: Martin Dilger on Understanding Eventsourcing [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:36
Martin Dilger, founder and CEO of Nebuilt GmbH, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about event sourcing -- a software architecture pattern in which, rather than storing just the current state of your data, you store a seq…
SE Radio 719: Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:57
Birol Yildiz, CEO and co-founder of iLert, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore how iLert built an AI SRE — an autonomous agent for handling production incidents — and what the experience revealed about building AI agen…
SE Radio 718: Will Sentance on JS Modernization [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:43
Will Sentance, educator and co-founder of Codesmith, joins SE Radio's Adi Narayan to discuss the evolution of JavaScript and modern best practices. They begin with JavaScript's origins as a simple scripting language and…