We hired a doctor as our new CTO

A doctor is our new CTO... Here's the story.

In May 2020, I was CTO at Remote. It was mid-pandemic and we had started growing our engineering team. I had budget for exactly one frontend developer and already met the person I was going to hire. I started prepping a job offer when I realized I had another interview scheduled for the same role within hours. I decided to keep the meeting anyway because the candidate's background was a bit perplexing to me, first job listed as "Paediatrician". What?!!

I met Sofia in a Zoom call and of course the first thing I ask her was "how does a doctor end up becoming a Frontend engineer?" She replied unapologetically: "I tried, I liked, I kept going".

By the end of the hiring process, I knew I had two problems.

1. I was the one being interviewed by her and I failed. Sofia told me directly she wasn't super convinced on joining us; and

2. I now had two fantastic candidates but could only hire one person for the role. I called Job (my co-founder) after the last meeting with Sofia and told him, "we have budget for one engineer, I found two. The foundational team needs to be epic and we need to find a way to afford them both." He immediately said "do it, we'll find a way". I left out the part where I still had to convince her to join. It took a few more calls with Sofia and reaching out to people in our common network to convince her but I finally managed to hire her.

Being a doctor is one of the hardest jobs in the world, very high impact, often well compensated, lots of risk, and yet she decided to take up another very complicated craft, Frontend Engineering. Why? Because she liked it and no one could tell her otherwise. This determination immediately struck a chord with me. She also aced our high bar technical challenges and came back with feedback about how both could actually be improved.

Year after year, Sofia kept taking on more responsibilities, going deeper and wider in the organization. She went from Frontend engineer to Tech Lead > Team Lead > Engineering Manager > Director > VP of Engineering. The VP of Engineering role came naturally to Sofia. She is a born leader and technically brilliant, but above all else, she cares deeply. She cares for the team, the company, our users, our customers - no rock left unturned.

Where to now?

Meanwhile, as co-founder, I go where the business needs me, from CTO to COO, and eventually, to President. Over time, and as Remote grew, I kept taking on more responsibilities and engineering became just one of the many pillars I was overseeing directly. I realized, however, that "overseeing directly" was mostly me clinging to my past CTO role. Sofia had taken over entirely, and garnered unanimous trust from our whole executive team.

As we all know, AI is rapidly changing everything, Remote went from "engineers can build" to "everyone builds". Every team is AI-pilled and it's remarkable to witness. It's a significant change of mentality and pace. Such changes require more than just a new toolkit, it requires a fundamental embracing of this new reality, where anyone can build anything.

So, the decision was clear. We promoted the person who lives by "you can just do things", long before AI made it a slogan.

We are thrilled to announce that Sofia Silva is now CTO at Remote. Can't wait to see how she makes the role her own. As for me? You'll have to stay tuned to find out...

Remote CTO Sofia Silva with Chris McCord and José Valim, the creators of Phoenix and Elixir, the framework and language powering what we're building. In pink, Engineering Director Eduardo Pereira.