Gergely Orosz writes The Pragmatic Engineer and hosts its software-engineering podcast. A former Uber engineering manager, he explains how engineering teams build systems and how developers grow into senior technical roles.[1][2][3]
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Career
Orosz led mobile, web and backend teams at Uber in Amsterdam and helped ship part of its payments system. Before Uber he worked at Skyscanner and Skype, where his projects included Skype for Xbox One and the web. His earlier experience also includes trading software at J.P. Morgan. He now concentrates on the newsletter, podcast and books.[1][2]
Contributions
Explaining engineering as a profession
The Software Engineer’s Guidebook addresses progression through senior engineer, technical lead, staff and principal roles. Building Mobile Apps at Scale examines recurring problems in large native iOS and Android applications, including the organizational challenges that appear as teams grow. The Tech Resume Inside Out draws on his hiring experience and input from recruiters and hiring managers to help developers represent their work in applications. These resources turn experience inside engineering organizations into guidance for readers making similar decisions. The Guidebook separates career fundamentals from the increasingly broad responsibilities of developers, senior engineers, technical leads and staff or principal engineers. Its contents progress from coding and getting work done to collaboration, production delivery, stakeholder management and reliable systems. Orosz recommends using it as a reference for current difficulties and the next role, while acknowledging that companies assign different expectations to the same title.[3][5]
Reporting on engineering inside AI labs
For his July 2026 Anthropic report, Orosz visited the company and interviewed engineers working on Claude Platform, Bun, Claude Code and applied AI. He contrasts faster implementation and more fluid prototyping with the continued need for planning, testing and coordination on complex infrastructure. The report uses the Managed Agents project to explain why an architectural change still requires agreement across product, platform and sandbox teams.[6]
Ideas
In his 2020 departure account, Orosz describes moving from mobile work into payments systems and engineering management at Uber. He recommends reading incident reviews and design documents outside one’s immediate team, then following unfamiliar systems closely enough to understand their failure modes. He connects career growth to taking responsibility for problems and making commitments a team can actually deliver. These are lessons from his own employment experience, which he develops in the broader career guidance of his books.[4][3]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
The Software Engineer’s Guidebookengguidebook.comA guide to growing through senior, technical-lead, staff and principal engineering roles.
Start with the Guidebook if you want to understand responsibilities beyond writing code. It is aimed at practicing engineers considering senior and leadership roles, so basic professional software experience helps.
- What’s the ROI of software engineers’ spending on AI?newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The Pragmatic Engineer surveys 27 companies on AI agent spending per engineer, spending caps, and PR throughput before and after adoption, with aggregate data from CodeRabbit and Gitar showing roughly 2x weekly PRs and 60+ PRs per developer for AI-native teams.
Catalog workOriginal source - Uber’s AI infra, from the insidenewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A Pragmatic Engineer episode walks through Uber's internal developer and AI infrastructure, including DevPods, Code Inbox, Slate and Wisdom, and how engineers use them day to day.
Catalog workOriginal source - The state of the tech industry in 2026newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Pragmatic Engineer's state-of-the-industry snapshot from lab visits and new GitHub, Factory AI and Linear data: near-universal agent-written code, multi-agent workflows, broken review and quality assumptions, and what endures.
Catalog workOriginal source - Distributed databases with Peter Mattisnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The Pragmatic Engineer interviews Cockroach Labs CTO Peter Mattis on how a veteran who shipped database-grade code pre-AI now feels more productive with AI tooling while keeping quality.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why has Shopify dropped React Native?newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz examines why Shopify reversed its React Native bet for native mobile development, arguing that stronger AI coding agents changed the tradeoff. He covers the 2020 rationale, the shift, and what it means for the wider mobile ecosystem.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pulse: RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debatenewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz covers DHH's Rails World keynote declaring hand-written code over at 37signals as it shifts to agent-generated code, alongside Amazon and Meta's engineering hiring struggles and the likely decline of manual code review.
Catalog workOriginal source - How will AI change operating systems? Part 2: Windowsnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz interviews Microsoft's Windows team about native agent-identity primitives and a local MCP server registry planned for Windows, and examines whether developers who left the OS will return.
Catalog workOriginal source - AI Skills with Matt Pococknewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The Pragmatic Engineer interviews Matt Pocock, creator of the popular 'grill-me' Claude skill and the AI Hero course, on why fundamentals still matter for engineers leaning on coding agents and how he builds skills people actually keep using.
Catalog workOriginal source - Inside OpenAI’s agentic software factorynewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz interviews seven OpenAI engineering leaders on how Codex became the backbone of the company's work, with IDE usage declining and PR review being rebuilt around an agentic 'software factory' of automated production and performance monitoring loops.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pulse #191: a new trend of CPU shortagesnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz reports a new CPU shortage taking shape as AI agents' heavy tool-calling drives compute demand beyond the earlier GPU and memory crunches, and argues teams should reserve compute capacity now.
Catalog workOriginal source - Building Codex with Tibo Sottiauxnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A conversation with the OpenAI engineer who helped build Codex on why the CLI runs on Rust, why OpenAI open-sourced it, and how the harness and models underneath it have changed since release.
Catalog workOriginal source - What is happening with code reviews?newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz catalogs how top engineering orgs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are adapting code review to AI-generated PR volume: reviewing the AI review, blast-radius triage to skip low-risk review, and reviewing plans/schemas instead of full diffs.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pulse: tech companies move to open AI modelsnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Details a cost-cutting pattern spreading across major tech engineering orgs: shifting simpler AI workloads from proprietary frontier models to open-weight models with smart routing, cutting AI bills by roughly half at companies including Uber, Pinterest, Stripe, Coinbase, Ramp, and AT&T.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspectnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Ramp's engineering leadership walks through Inspect, the in-house coding agent it built rather than adopting a third-party harness: remote sandboxes with access to internal data sources, many agents in parallel, backend and frontend changes verified remotely, and bugfixing driven from Slack.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pulse: We need to talk about migrations with AInewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
One team migrated off a testing framework in two weeks with AI, a rewrite it had put off for years, and it is not the only one finding that framework migrations are suddenly tractable. The issue also covers the engineering leader career break and what AI startups do to analyst firms.
Catalog workOriginal source - From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaninewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A long interview with Addy Osmani on the path from building browser tooling to AI developer experience, and on what changes in how engineers work when the assistant is in the loop.
Catalog workOriginal source - Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Charity Majors on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, arguing against continued skepticism about using AI in software development.
Catalog workOriginal source - Formal methods with Hillel Wayne (The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast)newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Hillel Wayne pushes back on the theory that machine-written code will finally mainstream formal verification, using TLA+ war stories like Amazon's 35-step distributed bug to show where specs pay off and where property-based testing is the realistic ceiling.
Catalog workOriginal source - How Building Software Is Changing at Anthropicnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
On-site reporting and interviews about planning, prototyping, review and testing at an AI lab.
Reporter and author[6]Original source - Pushing software engineering limits with “napkin math”newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz on napkin math, the practice of reasoning about system limits from a handful of memorised latency and throughput numbers, following an interview with turbopuffer's Simon Eskildsen.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pulse: Grok’s CLI caught uploading all your local files to the cloudnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The Pragmatic Engineer's Pulse on Grok's CLI being caught uploading users' local files, including SSH keys and documents, to the cloud just as the capable Grok 4.5 model was winning developers over.
Catalog workOriginal source - Context engineering with Dex Horthynewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Dex Horthy on context engineering: what actually goes into an agent's window, and why managing that is the discipline rather than prompt wording.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun’s rapid Rust rewrite with AI?newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Spending $165,000 to migrate Bun from Zig to Rust looks expensive until you note it compressed a one-to-two-year migration into 11 days, which changes what migrations are worth attempting at all.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast: Kent Beck Episodenewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Kent Beck revisits TDD, Extreme Programming and the Agile Manifesto for the agent era, with a sharper claim underneath the history: teams now pile up generated code much faster than they build trust in it, and the practices have to close that gap.
Catalog workOriginal source - Impressions from visiting OpenAI, Anthropic, & Cursornewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Impressions from visiting the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic and Cursor in San Francisco, and what the engineers there say about how they actually work day to day.
Catalog workOriginal source - Slow down to speed up: so much has changed in 6 months’ timenewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A keynote argument that slowing down is how teams speed up, revisited after six months in which almost everything about the tooling changed.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Gergely Orosz on what has been happening inside Meta's engineering organisation, and why the changes look self-inflicted from the outside.
Catalog workOriginal source - Slow Down to Speed Up (The Pragmatic Engineer)newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
An editorial article from The Pragmatic Engineer exploring how AI coding tools are dramatically increasing the volume of code developers generate, and why deliberately slowing down can improve quality, reliability, and reduce tech debt.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pulse: a trend of trying to cut back on AI spend within eng departments?newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The Pragmatic Engineer's Pulse on engineering departments starting to question AI ROI, with mid-sized and large companies dampening agent spend through per-engineer monthly budgets.
Catalog workOriginal source - Building OpenCode with Dax Raadnewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Dax Raad on building OpenCode, on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast.
Catalog workOriginal source - The Pragmatic Engineer newsletternewsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Research and practical reporting for software engineers and engineering leaders.
- The Pragmatic Engineer Podcastpragmaticpodcast.com
Conversations about software engineering practice and careers.