Angel Paredes
Engineering Manager at Datadog
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Angel Paredes — Engineering Manager at Datadog, formerly Staff at Glovo and Tech Lead at PayPal — to explore test infra, AI's impact on interviewing, and how to lead without losing your technical edge.
Main Takeaways from my conversation with Angel:
🧪 Test infra will haunt you.
Angel promised himself he’d never build another test tooling platform after leading one at Glovo. He now leads Datadog’s test optimization team—handling framework injection, flakiness detection, and runtime rewrites.
📦 His monorepo takes 30 minutes to clone.
Yes, really. But they’ve structured it as a multi-package setup with strict boundaries, making TypeScript, builds, and linking tolerable—and even fast. “Best DX I’ve ever had.”
💥 Promotions felt like a zero-sum game.
Climbing to staff engineer meant stepping on other people’s scope. Becoming a manager, in contrast, gave him impact without stepping over others. “As a manager, you get a team for free.”
🧠 Senior engineers don’t need handholding, they need focus.
Most of his time goes to aligning the plan and handing out the right challenge. Especially for senior folks who’ve done the same thing for years.
🧠 He still codes—every week.
Angel writes frontend and backend code regularly, even as a manager. “I’m faster in frontend, so I ship there to unblock the team.”
🤖 AI is already changing interviews—and people are cheating.
From deepfakes to screen overlays to ChatGPT whispering the answers, Angel’s seen it all. But if a dev needs ChatGPT at work too? “That’s fine. Just don’t fake your identity.”
🔍 Interviewing is broken—and AI is forcing a reset.
Angel argues for code review-style interviews, real-time debugging sessions, and culture rounds that focus less on similarity and more on team fit. “Most rubrics are just recipes.”
💬 They inject into Jest… without plugins.
Datadog’s team reverse-engineers testing frameworks at the module level, bypassing plugins and altering runtime behaviors. It’s surgical, not superficial.
🧑🏫 Conference speaking changed how he shows up in meetings.
He was terrified of speaking on stage. Now he credits public talks with helping him communicate clearly under pressure, lead better, and fight impostor syndrome.
📚 Book recs:
- Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner
- Managing Humans by Michael Lopp
- The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
- The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
- Plus: Terry Pratchett’s Guards, Guards! for a crash course in managing a team of weirdos
📖 We also talk about fantasy, reading 60+ Forgotten Realms books, and why Journey Before Destination is the right motto for scaling careers.
Episode Length: 1hour and 1 minute of raw insights, technical nerdery, and real management talk
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