A look inside an engineering team @OpenAI with Dylan Vassallo Artwork

StaffEng

Conversations with software engineers who have progressed beyond the career level, into Staff levels and beyond. We discuss the areas of work that set Staff-plus level engineers apart from other individual contributors; things like setting technical direction, mentorship and sponsorship, providing engineering perspective to the org, etc.Hosted by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles).

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StaffEng

A look inside an engineering team @OpenAI with Dylan Vassallo

April 09, 2026 • David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles) • Season 2 • Episode 3

0:00 | 44:43

Dylan Vassallo is an engineering manager at OpenAI leading the People Innovation Labs team — an eng, product, and design team embedded within the People org, building AI-powered tools for recruiting, HR, internal comms, and the employee experience.

In this episode, Dylan talks about what it actually looks like to be an engineering team inside a frontier AI company, how non-engineers are becoming builders, and what the "graduation" process looks like when a prototype needs to become a production system.

Links & References

https://x.com/dylanvee
OpenAI Codex - https://openai.com/codex
Lattice - https://lattice.com — performance management platform mentioned
Linear - https://linear.app — used for team project tracking
Workday - https://workday.com — referenced as system of record