Vaz is an engineering manager for the Pages product at LinkedIn, where he helps organizations establish their presence and connect with professionals at a global scale. In this episode, we discuss Vaz's journey as a software engineer into leadership positions, and I get a great new perspective on performance management of individuals.

 Vaz has over 15 years of experience as an engineering manager in places like Stripe, Google and his own company. In his ten years at Google, Vaz held many externally facing engineering roles, both as an individual contributor and manager for different teams across the Americas region both in their Ads business and at Google Cloud.

Prior to Google he was the co-founder and CTO of a company that develops software and provides infrastructure for financial institutions and security agencies.

Since 2013 he has been based out of the San Francisco Bay area after relocating from Mexico where he is originally from. Outside of work he enjoys playing with his 4yr old son, biking,  watching movies with his wife and consuming any post-apocalyptic media that is produced. 

He holds a Computer Science degree from U.N.A.M. where he also helped others get theirs working there as a Professor and Developer. 

Another episode where I speak with a fellow author! Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You - a practical guide for navigating one's career that is packed with real-life skills they don't teach in college. 

Educated at MIT, Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia. He’s developed new software languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals and terrorists on the dark web. Mark helped create the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, MIT’s “Career Success Accelerator”, where he’s taught for twenty years. Mark also serves on the boards of non-profits Techie Youth and Plant a Million Corals.

Mark and I have a great conversation about what inspired him to write this book and some of the career development advice he has for aspiring and new managers - and some lessons he learned the hard way so you don't have to!

As the Vice President of Data Management at Castlight Health, Lauren Bui leads a diverse and dynamic team that delivers insights and modernization to 20+ million patient datasets through Castlight's suite of applications. That in and of itself is impressive feat, and in this episode of manager.flow, Lauren discusses her journey and growth into the highest levels of technical leadership over a several-decade period. 

Notably, in 2018 she was presented the Dallas Business Journal - Women in Technology Leadership award, served as the 2019 keynote speaker at the Health Innovations Summit and has served on the MIT CISR committee.  Lauren is also published in Health Tech and Digital Health and also the HCI Digital Health magazines. 

Lauren and I also discuss some shared experiences in being children of immigrants as her family escaped from Vietnam during the conflicts in the 20th century, and how these identities interplay and affect leadership styles. She's got a fascinating story and an important perspective on people-management and identity.