This is a conversation with Jeff Escalante, who’s currently a Director of Engineering at Clerk, where he spends more than 80% of his time writing code.

Before that, Jeff was an early engineer at HashiCorp, where he joined around 200 employees and stayed through the company growing to thousands of employees and eventually IPOing. During that time, he also became a prominent contributor to Next.js, which led him to join Vercel as the manager of the Next.js team, where he helped shape the roadmap for one of the most important frameworks in web development.

In this episode, we talk about how Jeff broke into software engineering without a traditional CS background, how to get hired without spraying your résumé everywhere, what he’s learned from spending most of his career in dev tools, how Clerk thinks about engineering, and how AI is changing the way software engineering actually works.

Hope you enjoy the first episode, and welcome to the podcast.