Felix Becker
I enjoy creating awesome products, building teams, learning new and old things. I love working on the intersections: collaborating with PMs, designers, engineers, other teams, customers and customer-facing roles to make magic happen. I’m deeply passionate about web technologies, from the bleeding edge to the niches. I care about high quality in everything I make.
Work
Anthropic
- Company Size
- ~1000
- Technologies
- TypeScript, React, Python, REST, LLMs
Member of Technical Staff on the Developer Experience team — owning the end-to-end experience for developers seeking to use Anthropic’s AI.
BRM.ai
- Company Size
- 8
- Technologies
- TypeScript, React, REST, Node, PostgreSQL, Terraform, LLMs
I joined BRM in March 2023, knowing one of the founders from my early time at Sourcegraph and being fully convinced by the product opportunity. I joined as a founding engineer, forming an engineering team of 3 people (now 6 and growing).
The biggest and most exciting challenge at BRM is: How can we build the buying equivalent of a CRM with the same level of customizability, but with better collaboration and real-time features, with a small team, in record time to market? I’m proud to have designed & built major parts of the BRM system to solve that challenge successfully.
Accomplishments:
- Designed and implemented the fully-customizable workflow system of BRM
- Envisioned and built BRM’s generic collaboration system (conversations on any data field) with email/Slack notifications, email reply handling, reactions, …
- Designed and implemented BRM’s generic custom fields system with application-wide editing, filtering, sorting ability, permissioning, and dynamic forms — speeding up adoption as customers can easily extend BRM to fit their needs.
- Used cutting-edge LLMs and tuned prompts for various features like legal document extraction, deduplication, vector search. Evaluated and compared performance of different models
- Guided other engineers in architecture and design of features
- Worked closely with our designer, CTO, and CEO
Sourcegraph (6 years)
I joined Sourcegraph post Series A when it counted ~15 people. When I moved on after 6 years, Sourcegraph had just short of 300 teammates and had grown to a $2B company. I loved working on a product I could inherently connect with: improving developer tooling, building a product that I would want to use myself every day. I got the chance to work with incredibly talented people and navigate with Sourcegraph through the many stages and challenges of growth, from technical challenges as an engineer to solving organizational challenges as a manager.
Two of Sourcegraph’s company values especially resonated with me: High Agency and High Quality. Additionally, being fully remote and distributed around the world demanded an extremely high standard for communication skills.
One of the greatest aspects about Sourcegraph is that it is fully open-source — meaning every pull request I implemented, every RFC I wrote or reviewed, even every process update I made to the handbook is publicly archived on GitHub.
Managing Code Exploration and Code Insights
- Company Size
- 291
- Technologies
- TypeScript, React, SCSS, GraphQL, Go, Kubernetes
After a major reorganization and leadership change in 2022, I took over the “Code Exploration” team consisting of all frontend engineers at Sourcegraph in addition to the Code Insights team. I was responsible for setting a new vision, direction and strategy for Sourcegraph’s core code exploration experience.
Managing the Code Insights team
- Company Size
- 112
- Technologies
- TypeScript, React, SVG, SCSS, GraphQL, Go, Kubernetes
In 2020, I proposed a new product for Sourcegraph I felt was the next logical step for Sourcegraph and a missing key to the company’s goals. My proposal convinced executives, PMs, sales people, and engineers. I got to hire an amazing team from scratch and took on the Engineering Manager role for the Code Insights team — taking on ultimate accountability for its success, setting the team culture and leading it through roadmap planning, coaching, from Beta milestone to GA, and everything in between.
Accomplishments:
- Increased global company revenue by 11%, sales accounted for 10% of all net new revenue for 3+ consecutive quarters
- Hired, managed, and coached a team of 6 engineers of diverse experience levels
- Worked closely with our team PM to set our strategy and roadmap to increase sales
- Guided the team through retrospectives, planning, and processes to ensure we’re continuously learning
- Held all of us accountable to a high bar of quality, reliability, and agency
- Collaborated with other EMs to align cross-team goals
- Ensured department-wide fair performance evaluation by creating Sourcegraph’s first career framework (leveling system) for Engineering, which became the model example for other departments
- Organized the cross-team Frontend Crew meetings and acted as an advisor for large cross-team frontend initiatives, such as the WCAG compliance project
Leadership on the Web team
- Company Size
- 77
- Technologies
- TypeScript, React, RxJS, WebWorkers, WebExtensions, SCSS, Kubernetes
I served the “Web” team during Sourcegraph’s rapid-growth period, as new teams were formed for each product area with their own embedded frontend engineers, replacing the prior dual backend/frontend team split. I helped manage the transition, evolved our web tech stack to support the new teams, and solved the most high-impact technical challenges we faced across all Sourcegraph web clients.
Accomplishments:
- Solved long-standing flakiness in Sourcegraph’s browser extension by refactoring the codebase to a reactive architecture, introducing a unit testing setup in CI, and introduced interfaces for reusability across different target websites
- Rearchitected Sourcegraph extensions (allowing users to fully customize Sourcegraph’s UI through an extension API) using brand new web technologies, eliminating slow engineering velocity and high rate of bugs. I spoke about this solution at TypeScript Seattle 2019
- Designed our hiring process for frontend engineers and helped hire and onboard over a dozen new engineers
Finding Product-Market-Fit
- Company Size
- 42
- Technologies
- TypeScript, React, SCSS, Electron, GraphQL, Go, Kubernetes
Accomplishments:
- Envisioned and implemented the first version of the Sourcegraph Code Search UI, which became Sourcegraph’s main product
- Worked closely with our designer to establish reusable design patterns in our frontend codebase
- Brought Sourcegraph’s Electron desktop app to market
Work on Language Servers
- Company Size
- 15
- Technologies
- TypeScript, Node, Go, Kubernetes
My first work at Sourcegraph was on language servers for PHP and TypeScript, back when Sourcegraph’s slogan was “Code Intelligence for Teams”. I got to work on compilers, distributed system problems, and performance to deliver code intelligence just-in-time from the cloud, across all the repositories of our customers and the entire open-source ecosystem. I gave my talk TypeScript Code Intelligence at Scale about the technology at FOSDEM 2019.
Accomplishments:
- Owned the TypeScript and PHP Language Server Protocol (LSP) servers
- Spec’d protocol extensions to support features that would be implemented by all of our language servers and/or got adopted by Microsoft into the official LSP spec
- Improved performance of language servers through OpenTracing instrumentation and caching strategies
Aerapass
- Company Size
- 5
- Technologies
- Node, PostgreSQL, REST, AngularJS
Aerapass was the first startup I worked at. With a small team, we built a modern payments platform with low transaction cost. I really enjoyed the challenge of dealing with the high regulatory requirements in fintech while still moving fast and providing a great UX.
We were working on two products: A payments platform with a large legacy codebase and a brand new investment product that was built from scratch. For me my work here meant a lot of fixing bugs in the “legacy” codebase, realizing what conditions allowed them to happen, and applying those learnings in the greenfield codebase to build a more resilient system.
Accomplishments:
- Modeled the database schema and REST API from scratch and continuously evolved it with our platform
- Established automated testing
- Implemented a flexible design system in CSS
- Lead migration from Angular 1 to Angular 2
Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI)
- Team Size
- 1
- Technologies
- JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, REST, Angular.js, D3.js, SVG, CSS
Designed and developed research software for data entry and visualization for long-term research on media usage.
Accomplishments:
- Worked directly with researchers to determine requirements and refine the UI based on feedback
- Designed database schema, REST API, and UI from scratch
- Build unique and flexible data visualization capabilities using D3 and SVG