Victoria Jeffrey.
I manage engineers and still commit code.
Senior Staff Engineering Manager at Mondoo. Eleven engineers spread across the US and Europe, a startup small enough that I’m still in the codebase every day, and ten years of doing all of it remote.
Three things tell me it’s going well.
Not headcount, not velocity. These three.
A relatively happy team.
Fairness first. Real growth opportunities, offered on purpose rather than when someone asks. And nobody gets boxed in — past focus areas don’t dictate future growth paths.
Features that actually land.
Flows and acceptance criteria before we build, not after. Communication the whole way through, to the team and out of it. “Delivered” means finished and understood, not merged.
We find it before the customer does.
My bar is knowing about roughly 60% of customer issues before support ever gets a ticket. That means alerts, monitoring, dashboards — and a standing habit of actually reading them.
All of it across time zones. Every team I’ve led has been distributed between the US and Europe, and I’ve worked remote for my entire career in tech. Written-first, decisions in public, and a real overlap window that we protect.
Two companies, ten years, one career change.
- 2014
Career change, on purpose
Before tech: legal secretary in NYC, office manager in Montreal, English teacher in La Paz, preschool teacher in Phoenix. Then a Udacity Front-End Nanodegree and a decision.
- 2015 – 2020 · Chef Software
Junior engineer → engineering manager
Joined as an SDE I writing JavaScript UI. Moved to Go, worked on InSpec and cloud SDK integrations for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Became a lead, then a manager — two teams, ~10 reports, owning the domain services behind Automate. Left after the Progress acquisition.
- 2021 – now · Mondoo
Senior Staff Engineering Manager
First non-founding employee. Hired as an engineer, now managing managers across an eleven-person team while still owning delivery myself — product metrics end to end, workload-identity-friendly OIDC, and whatever else needs building.
The keyboard is not decorative.
Most of what I build now lives in private repos, so here’s what it was and what changed.
Product metrics, end to end
Built the pipeline and the metrics site behind it, so usage across the platform is something we look at rather than guess at.
Workload-identity-friendly OIDC
Authentication that fits how workloads actually run, without handing out long-lived credentials.
Live contribution graph — public repos only, which undersells it.
The rest of it.
Words before code
Linguistics degree, Ancient Greek minor. English, Spanish (learned in Bolivia), and French — technically my first language, though I don’t get to use it much anymore.
Places
Marrakesh, Reykjavík, and Montréal are the favourites so far. Six months studying in Saint-Louis, Senegal that I’d like to repeat. Jamaica when I want to do nothing at all.
Denver
Outdoors when the weather allows. A high-schooler who keeps me both busy and honest.
How I travel
No plan. Whole days wandering a beautiful city, seeing where it goes. It’s the only part of my life without acceptance criteria.
Tell me what you’re building.
Hiring, comparing notes on managing distributed teams, or asking how someone goes from teaching preschool to writing Go — all welcome.