The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo: Engineering Jobs, Interviews, and FAANG Career Strategy

Episode 54 of The Tech Career Podcast tackles a delicate topic that rarely gets discussed openly: what happens when a teammate is underperforming. Lucas and Luna break down the specific steps FAANG engineers take before escalating — from data-driven documentation to skip-level conversations. They walk through a real case: a senior engineer at Alphabet who was three sprints behind on a critical dep...

Episode 53 of The Tech Career Podcast dives into one of the most dreaded yet essential parts of engineering life: on-call rotations. Lucas breaks down how Google, Meta, and Amazon structure their on-call schedules, why engineers at Netflix famously have near-zero on-call burden, and the concrete playbook for surviving — even thriving — during rotation weeks. Luna pushes back on the 'blame culture'...

Lucas and Luna tackle a career skill rarely taught in engineering bootcamps: navigating organizational politics in large tech companies. Using a real case from a recent Meta infrastructure migration, they break down how a senior engineer at a FAANG company successfully steered a high-stakes cross-team project through competing priorities, hidden agendas, and shifting deadlines. Lucas shares a spec...

Lucas and Luna explore how senior engineers at companies like Google and Meta use observability — not just monitoring — to debug production issues faster. They break down the three pillars (metrics, logs, traces), explain why dashboards full of green checks can be misleading, and share a concrete example of how a single distributed trace saved a team six hours of debugging. Luna challenges whether...

Lucas and Luna dig into the real reason side projects matter at places like Google, Meta, and Apple: they're not about passion or side income, they're about creating visible, measurable impact that promotion committees can evaluate. They break down a specific case of a Meta engineer who built an internal dashboard, got it adopted by three teams, and turned that into a level-six promotion. They als...

In Episode 49 of The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how FAANG engineers develop psychological resilience to combat impostor syndrome. They break down the specific cognitive patterns that trigger impostor feelings—like comparing yourself to peers who seem to code faster or knowing more about a niche tool—and share evidence-based strategies used by engineers at Google, Meta...

Lucas and Luna break down how FAANG engineers systematically prepare for system design interviews through structured drills, whiteboard practice, and design document reviews. They reveal the specific weekly rhythm top candidates use, from working through past interview questions to timing themselves on scalability discussions. The episode covers why mock interviews with peers beat solo prep, how t...

In Episode 47 of The Tech Career Podcast, Lucas and Luna dig into the specifics of negotiating equity compensation at FAANG companies in 2026. They break down how stock grant structures have shifted with the rise of annual refreshes, performance-based stock units, and the impact of higher interest rates on RSU valuations. Using concrete examples from Meta and Apple, they explain the difference bet...

Episode 46 of The Tech Career Podcast tackles one of the toughest choices engineers face: stay at a FAANG company or jump to a startup. Lucas and Luna break down the real trade-offs beyond equity math — using the specific example of an L5 engineer at Amazon who joined an early-stage startup as employee number 15. They discuss how to evaluate startup equity versus FAANG RSUs, the compensation cliff...

Episode 45 of The Tech Career Podcast tackles a challenge every FAANG engineer faces: ambiguous project requirements. Lucas and Luna break down a real case from Meta's internal tools team in early 2026, where a vague 'improve developer velocity' task turned into a six-month rabbit hole. They walk through the decision framework one senior engineer used to push back, propose a measurable scope, and...

Lucas and Luna dive into the hidden skill of resume optimization for internal tools at FAANG companies. They discuss why emphasizing internal platform work can boost hiring chances, citing real examples like Amazon's internal CI/CD pipeline and Google's Borg system. Lucas shares data from a 2025 LinkedIn study showing 40% of FAANG engineers highlight internal tools on their resumes, while Luna bri...

Lucas and Luna break down the cloud platform decision that FAANG engineers face when building new services. They compare GCP, AWS, and Azure across cost, developer experience, and lock-in risk, using real examples like Google's BigQuery lock-in and AWS's Lambda pricing quirks. The episode explains how engineers at companies like Netflix and Pinterest made their cloud choices, and offers a framewor...

Lucas and Luna dive into how FAANG engineers leverage performance metrics—not just code output—to build strong promotion cases. They break down a real example from a senior engineer at Amazon who used latency reduction data and cross-team impact metrics to jump from L5 to L6 in 18 months. The conversation covers which metrics matter most, how to frame them for review committees, and common pitfall...

Episode 41 of The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo focuses on one specific, often-overlooked piece of the FAANG offer: the signing bonus. Lucas and Luna break down the typical structure—how signing bonuses are taxed, clawed back, and used to offset forgone equity from a current employer. Lucas shares a concrete example: a senior engineer who received a $100,000 signing bonus from Amazon in 2025, h...

In this episode, Lucas and Luna break down the specific skills and mindset shifts required to transition from individual contributor to engineering manager at companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. They explore the 'technical debt' of leadership — the surprising ways your engineering strengths can become liabilities as a manager. Using real examples from FAANG career ladders, they discuss why em...

Episode 39 of The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo dives into a specific system design interview framework used by FAANG engineers. Lucas and Luna break down the 'four-step method' — requirements, estimation, data model, and deep dive — using a real example: designing a URL shortener like TinyURL. They discuss common pitfalls, how to structure your answer under time pressure, and why interviewers...

Episode 38 of The Tech Career Podcast dives into internal mobility at FAANG companies—how engineers can move between teams, roles, and even locations without leaving their employer. Lucas breaks down the mechanics: why internal transfers often beat external hiring, the hidden job market on internal tools, and what happened when a Meta engineer switched from ads to VR in six weeks. Luna shares a co...

Episode 37 of The Tech Career Podcast dives into one of the most underrated skills at FAANG: writing a technical design doc that actually gets buy-in. Lucas and Luna break down the anatomy of a great doc, from the one-paragraph summary to the controversial decisions section, using real examples from Amazon and Google. They explain why a design doc is really a persuasion document, how to handle rev...

In this episode of The Tech Career Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into one of the most underrated career skills for FAANG engineers: navigating code review conflicts. They break down a real scenario where a senior engineer rejected a junior's pull request over style preferences, and how the junior turned it into a learning opportunity. They discuss psychological safety, the difference between object...

Lucas and Luna dive into how FAANG engineers are actually using GitHub Copilot in 2026 — not just as an autocomplete tool, but as a scaffold for writing production-ready code. They break down a real example from a Meta senior engineer who uses Copilot to stub out unit tests, generate boilerplate for internal APIs, and even catch edge cases during code review. The conversation explores the unspoken...

Episode 34 of The Tech Career Podcast with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna explore how FAANG engineers use GitHub as a personal branding tool—not just for code, but for documentation, project READMEs, and open-source contributions. They break down a specific case: a Google engineer who turned a well-documented side project into a promotion-worthy portfolio piece. Learn the concrete steps to make your GitH...

In this episode of The Tech Career Podcast, Lucas and Luna tackle one of the most challenging topics in big tech: toxic management. They break down how FAANG engineers identify red flags early, navigate power dynamics without burning out, and decide when to escalate or exit. Using concrete examples like a real case at Amazon and internal strategies at Google and Meta, they discuss documentation te...

In this episode of The Tech Career Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore how FAANG engineers leverage mentorship to accelerate their careers. They discuss why mentorship matters beyond just interview prep, how to find the right mentor at a large tech company, and a framework for making the most of the relationship. Lucas shares a specific story from his own experience working with a senior engineer at G...

Getting a poor performance review at a FAANG company feels like a career earthquake — but the smartest engineers use it as a reset button, not a resignation letter. In this episode of The Tech Career Podcast, Lucas and Luna break down the specific playbook that top engineers follow when the rating comes back lower than expected: how to read the calibration data hidden in the review, what to say (a...

Episode 30 of The Tech Career Podcast explores a skill rarely talked about in FAANG interview prep: reverse engineering your own past work. Lucas and Luna discuss why the ability to deconstruct your own codebase — explaining design decisions, trade-offs, and failure modes — is increasingly prized in FAANG system design rounds and on-the-job code reviews. They break down a concrete example from a r...