Episode Description
Alicia Davis is the SVP of Engineering and Development Operations at Solera — a global enterprise operating at scale in vehicle lifecycle management — and she has takes that you won't hear from most engineering leaders. She loves reorgs. She thinks AI is going to put your agile team "on Ozempic." And she'll tell you flat out: you're not interviewing to find the best candidate. You're interviewing to filter out the ones who will do damage.This is a packed conversation on what it actually takes to lead engineering orgs through constant change — and what most leaders are getting dangerously wrong about AI adoption right now.What you'll learn:
- Why Alicia loves reorgs — and why she thinks AI will make them more frequent across every org
- The "two pizza team on Ozempic" theory: how AI shrinks team size while massively expanding capacity
- How the job of an engineer is flipping from 80% coding / 20% decisions to the exact reverse
- Why she's seeing candidates show up to interviews with AI assistants live on the call — and how she's adapted her process
- The Taco Bell cautionary tale: what happens when you rush AI into production without guardrails
- Why "good brakes make the car go faster" — and how that Agile principle applies to AI adoption right now
- What the trust gap in AI actually requires to close (hint: it's the same fundamentals as always)
- The contrarian hiring take: you're not interviewing for the best candidate, you're interviewing to exclude the harmful ones
- What the next generation of engineering leaders needs to do to stay ahead of disruption
About the guest:Alicia Davis is SVP of Engineering and Development Operations at Solera, the global leader in vehicle lifecycle management SaaS, data, and services. With deep experience leading large-scale engineering organizations through multiple technology hype cycles — cloud, DevOps, Kubernetes, and now AI — Alicia brings a pattern-recognition perspective on change that most leaders are still catching up to.
About Tech Teams Today:Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.
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