Mission hosted a fireside chat webinar with Jose Muniz, the VP of Engineering at Elevate Security, a leading Silicon Valley cybersecurity company.
The discussion was moderated by Mission Co-Founder & CEO Stéphane Rossi. Our Speaker Series events are open to all Mission members and will take place quarterly. The goal is to give our members access to learn from and talk to leaders in the software engineering and tech industries.
Jose, who was born and raised in Mexico, moved to Massachusetts at 18 to attend MIT. He has extensive experience leading teams at some of the world’s biggest and most prominent tech companies and building products that accelerate growth. Previously, he held the same role at People.ai, a CRM sales technology company. Jose’s experience includes engineering roles at Oracle, Sumo Logic, and LogicHub.
Throughout the event, Jose touched on many topics ranging from his personal career progression to the future of cybersecurity.
He kicked things off by discussing how he has always been driven by making an impact and the role that played in guiding his career path. While he thought joining a major corporation would enable him to have a huge global impact, he soon realized that he was better suited to working in smaller organizations. He loved the fun and challenge of growing a company, how you have to build out a product, solve problems, and scale all at the same time. He had officially caught the startup bug! “The journey from starting from scratch and building something impactful is challenging, but that’s when the fun happens”, says Jose.
On the topic of Mentorship, Jose mentioned that this was something he really struggled with in his early career. He found it to be a very daunting task to find the perfect, all encompassing person, and then to get them to agree to be his mentor. At some point, something clicked and he realized that there were several key areas where he wanted to improve and so he went out and found people who were experts and started talking to them about those specific subjects. This allowed him to build a battery of mentors for himself.
One story he told us was about one of his mentors who taught him the importance of dreaming big. When Jose first joined People.ai they were a tiny company, with very little funding and only a few people building the core system. While the people worked extremely hard and were doing a great job, they knew they needed to attract some bigger talent. His boss suggested that they try and hire some people from Google and Facebook but Jose immediately thought that that would be impossible. His boss proposed a crazy idea, that the next day when it was supposed to rain, they would take some umbrellas and coffee to the people waiting at the Google bus stop and start a conversation. And it worked! They ended up hiring some pretty incredible people from both Google and Facebook.
When asked about advice he had for those looking to transition from being an engineer to an engineering leader, Jose mentioned that you really need to understand what fulfills you more — building things, or empowering others to build things. He went back and forth between both quite a bit in his career and eventually realized he was more fulfilled when he saw others succeed.
Some of his advice for those looking to grow into a leadership role in software engineering centred around organic leadership. Jose spoke about how it is so much more valuable when an engineer becomes a leader naturally. You can do this by gaining trust from your team, by not being afraid to get involved in conversations, or by supporting and helping your colleagues. His big piece of advice was to not let your current title stop you from taking the next steps.
Finally, Jose discussed some of the big trends in cybersecurity at the moment, the biggest of them being how remote work is now the new normal. With 80% of the workforce being remote there is a whole set of challenges around access that is a bit of a security nightmare. There are a lot more attacks happening and companies are needing to adapt to that.
Curious about who our next guest speaker will be? Join Mission, a market network made up of top software developers from across the globe to get access to these events, and so much more! Through the Mission network you can get to know experts from all over the world, level up your skills with real-time contextual feedback, and gain access to curated opportunities working with some of North America’s most innovative companies.
