Sam Penrose

I build technology platforms and organizations that companies run on, leading teams of engineers, scientists, and managers while still selectively writing production code. In my last organization I hired twenty people and retained nineteen. My teams have shipped a range of business-critical projects serving millions of people:

• A $675MM partnership with a $54MM software component that I negotiated and owned, shipped by an organization I grew to 24 researchers and engineers: the platform cut fleet energy costs by roughly 25% and runs in production today
• LLM adoption training delivered as 300 person-lessons
• Data systems supporting millions of IoT devices in the rural global south over legacy cellular networks
• A petabyte-scale data pipeline producing the usage numbers behind our search revenue negotiations
• The identity system for a smartphone OS
• A filesystem rendering Manhattan as VFX in a landmark feature film

I’ve learned:

• How to turn research into a technology organization and business
• Why hiring should center the hiring team, not the candidate’s CV
• What underlying skills drive software engineering productivity, and how to structure a career ladder around them
• How knowledge workers and their leaders should think of LLMs as business tools

If you’re building something ambitious, reach out. I’m on LinkedIn.