I spent nine years getting very good at engineering leadership. I built teams, platforms, organizations, and systems at scale, but over time I became comfortable enough that I stopped deliberately stretching the technical side of myself.

The layoff exposed that more abruptly than I would have chosen.

The lesson isn’t that the previous nine years were wasted or that I need to start my career over. It’s that seniority does not eliminate the need to keep learning. In fact, the more senior I become, the more responsibility I have for creating my own growth when the environment stops creating it for me.

So this period isn’t about trying to become the engineer I was nine years ago. I’m rebuilding technical currency for the engineer and engineering leader I want to be next.

I’m coding again. I’m learning the infrastructure layers I previously led around but didn’t always operate myself. I’m learning how AI coding agents change the developer workflow, and separately learning how agentic systems are actually designed and built.

And I’m doing it by building something real rather than collecting courses and buzzwords.

The job search has also taught me something about how the market sees me. Anonymous applications rarely communicate the value of my background well. Conversations do. Nearly every meaningful opportunity I’ve had has come through another person.

So my strategy is becoming clearer: invest heavily in relationships, use the project to rebuild and demonstrate technical depth, and get better at translating nine years of leadership experience into the technical language the current market expects.

I don’t need to undo my career.

I need to update it.