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 717: Eric Tschetter on Decoupling Observability [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:13
In this episode, host Amey Ambade sits with Eric Tschetter, co-founder of Apache Druid and Chief Architect at Imply, to dissect the critical move toward Decoupling Observability. To begin, they define three pillars—logs,…
SE Radio 716: Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:14
Martin Kleppmann, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and author of the best-selling O'Reilly book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, talks to host Adi Narayan about local-first collaboration software.…
SE Radio 715: Sahaj Garg on Designing for Ambiguity in Human Input [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:02
Sahaj Garg, co-founder and CTO of Wispr, a voice-to-text AI that turns speech into polished writing, talks with host Amey Ambade about designing systems for the ambiguity that's inherent in human input (text, voice, mult…
SE Radio 714: Costa Alexoglou on Remote Pair Programming [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:27
Costa Alexoglou, co-founder of the open source Hopp pair-programming application, talks with host Brijesh Ammanath about remote pair programming. They start with a quick introduction to pair programming and its importanc…
SE Radio 712: Dan Lorenc on Sigstore [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:04
Dan Lorenc, co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to explore Sigstore and its role in securing the software supply chain. They unpack the challenges of supply chain security, including verifying…
SE Radio 711: Scott Hanselman on AI-Assisted Development Tools [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:15
Scott Hanselman, the VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about AI-assisted coding. They start by considering how the tools are a progression from syntax highlighting and autocomplete. Sco…
SE Radio 710: Marc Brooker on Spec-Driven AI Dev [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:27
Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore specification-driven development as a scalable alternative to prompt-by-prompt "vibe coding" in AI-assisted software engineering.…
SE Radio 709: Bryan Cantrill on the Data Center Control Plane [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:05:02
Bryan Cantrill, the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer company, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about challenges in deploying hardware on-premises at scale. They discuss the difficulty of building up Samsung data centers…
SE Radio 708: Jens Gustedt on C in 2026 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:27
Jens Gustedt, author of Modern C, senior scientist at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control (INRIA), deputy director of the ICube lab, and former co-editor of the ISO C standard, speaks with SE R…