career-growth
(5)
SheTO turns a room of strangers into a route to the top
A free network for women and non-binary engineering leaders tackles a peculiar career problem: the people who could help you may be people you have never met.
Teal
Teal is a Miami-based AI-powered career platform built for job seekers rather than recruiters. Founded in 2019 by former WeWork executive David Fano, Teal bundles an AI Resume Builder, Job Tracker, job board, Chrome extension, AI Interview Coach, and offer/salary tools into one workspace that helps professionals find, apply for, and land jobs they actually want. The company has grown to roughly 4 million members, has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands of interviews, and has raised about $19 million in venture funding, capped by a $7.5M Series A in January 2025.
Chief
Chief is a private membership network built for senior women executives - VPs, C-suite leaders, and the rungs just below. It pairs members into facilitated peer 'Core' groups led by executive coaches, layers on workshops, curated events, and physical clubhouses in major U.S. cities, and aims to close the gap at the top of the corporate ladder by giving women the kind of back-channel network that has long been reserved for men. Founded in 2019, Chief became one of the fastest female-founded U.S. companies to reach a $1 billion valuation.
Irina Stanescu
Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.
Ryan Peterman
Ryan Peterman went from new grad to Staff Engineer at Instagram in three years, then left one of tech's most coveted jobs to build what he wished existed. His newsletter 'The Developing Dev' has 106,000+ subscribers, his podcast 'The Peterman Pod' features career stories from top engineers, and his hardware company Compose is building an ultra-low-profile ergonomic keyboard. Based in San Francisco, he is the rare engineer who codes, writes, interviews Turing Award winners, and designs keyboards with equal intensity.