Priya Iyer Senior Engineering Manager
San Francisco, CA • priya.iyer@gmail.com • +1 415-555-0188
Profile Summary
- Senior Engineering Manager with 11 years of experience leading engineering teams on consumer marketplace platforms across rider growth, onboarding, and pricing, grown through Senior Engineer and Tech Lead roles before moving into people management.
- Solid engineering background across languages (Go, TypeScript), frameworks (React, gRPC), cloud (AWS), and data (PostgreSQL) so I can hold the architecture conversation with my team without dictating it.
- Deep practice in team building and hiring, career growth and performance, delivery and execution, and roadmap partnership, running weekly 1:1s and quarterly growth plans as the foundation of how the team operates.
- Partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and peer engineering managers in growth-stage product orgs, representing engineering in roadmap reviews, headcount planning, and on-call handoffs, and treating the EM job as a force-multiplier on the engineers around me.
- Manager who protects a culture of psychological safety and on-call health through clear expectations, blameless postmortems, and direct feedback, while running an EM peer cohort and contributing to the org's leveling and promotion playbooks.
Technical Skills
- People Management:
- 1:1s, performance reviews, career growth plans, promotion packets, coaching, conflict resolution, addressing underperformance
- Hiring & Team Building:
- Sourcing, interview loops, calibration, debrief facilitation, closing candidates, role scoping, team composition
- Delivery & Execution:
- Quarterly and sprint planning, OKRs, dependency tracking, risk management, scope negotiation, on-time shipping
- Languages:
- Go, TypeScript, Python, SQL, Java
- Frameworks & Services:
- React, Next.js, gRPC, REST, GraphQL, Kafka, microservices
- Cloud & Platform:
- AWS (ECS, Lambda, S3, RDS), Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog
- Data & Messaging:
- PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka, Snowflake, dbt
- On-Call & Reliability:
- SLOs, error budgets, PagerDuty rotations, blameless postmortems, incident command, runbook ownership
Education
University of California, Berkeley
B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Work Experience
Lyft
Senior Engineering Manager
- Manage the Rider Growth team of 11 engineers owning rider onboarding and acquisition surfaces for 28M monthly riders, running weekly 1:1s with every report to surface blockers, motivations, and wellbeing well before they show up in delivery.
- Run delivery through quarterly planning, weekly sprint reviews, and a shared risk log on every commitment, shipping the onboarding rewrite end-to-end in 2 quarters and lifting rider activation by 14% with no rollbacks.
- Own hiring end-to-end for the team, defining role scopes, sourcing in partnership with the recruiter, and chairing debriefs, closing 6 hires across 18 months out of 40+ interview panels with 100% 12-month retention.
- Ran 6 perf cycles end-to-end with calibration, written feedback, and growth plans for every report, shepherding 4 promotions to senior and staff and turning around 2 underperformance situations with direct feedback and structured support.
- Guide technical direction for the onboarding service without dictating it, anchoring an event-driven rewrite in design review and a stricter code-review rubric, with on-call load dropping from 14 pages/wk to 3 pages/wk across the team.
- Partner with Product and Design on the quarterly roadmap, holding a 70 / 30 feature-to-platform split that protects reliability and growth bets, and landing a 40% cut in onboarding tech debt across the year.
- Translate org strategy into the team's team charter and 4 OKR cycles a year, anchoring every commitment to the new-rider activation north star and contributing to a 22% year-over-year lift on the metric.
Pinterest
Engineering Manager
- Built and ran the Ads Reporting team from 3 to 9 engineers, anchoring the team's operating rhythm around standups, planning, and a signature blameless retros practice that the org later adopted as the standard cadence.
- Partnered cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, and Sales in a weekly triad to align priorities, unblock dependencies, and ship a shared reporting SLA agreement that ended a long-standing source of friction between engineering and the advertiser-facing org.
- Ran delivery on the self-serve dashboards launch end-to-end, breaking the work into milestones, tracking risk, and partnering with PM on scope, with the platform reaching 120k advertisers on hourly report freshness in the first year.
- Invested in career growth through weekly 1:1s, written growth plans, and explicit promotion packets, supporting 5 promotions to mid and senior and handing off 2 senior engineers into their own first-line EM roles inside the org.