#166 | Staff Engineering in the Age of AI How Engineering Teams, Roles, and Expectations Are Being Redefined w: Jordan Cutler @Pinterest

▶︎ #166 | Staff Engineering in the Age of AI: How Engineering Teams, Roles, and Expectations Are Being Redefined w/ Jordan Cutler @PinterestIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Jordan Cutler: Staff Engineer at Pinterest, where he leads web platform initiatives supporting over 200 engineers. Jordan's career moved from junior to senior in just two years at Gusto, then through Qualified (recently acquired by Salesforce), and into the kind of cross-functional, multi-team leadership that defines the Staff Engineer role today: a role many leaders still don't fully understand.What makes this conversation stand out is Jordan's unflinching clarity about how AI is not just changing what engineers do, but raising the bar at every level of the career ladder. The mid-level engineer is now expected to do what seniors did three years ago. Juniors entering the market face a job board that has shrunk to under 10% of all engineering listings. And the engineers who will thrive are not the ones who write the most code by hand: they're the ones who can recognize high-ROI opportunities, delegate implementation to AI-powered systems, and build things that compound impact over time.Jordan also shares what the Staff Engineer role actually means: not just leading within a team, but expanding scope across teams, connecting strategic company goals to concrete technical initiatives, and selling ideas in ways that bring people along.If you're leading engineering teams, thinking about what to expect from your engineers in 2026, or navigating your own transition from code-first to strategy-first thinking, this episode will give you a new lens on what the role actually demands now.✔︎ Mentioned in the episode:"Radical Candor" by Kim Scott”✉︎ FOLLOW JORDAN ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @jordancutler1✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanskaTikTok: @aleksandra_lemanskaX: @lemanskillsStartup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scpwww.lemanskills.comJoin Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/