I joined LoginRadius in 2012 as a junior developer and left in 2024 as VP of Product and Engineering. Eleven years and seven months. In an industry that treats a two-year tenure as a long one, that needs some explaining.
The thing nobody tells you about staying
Job hopping optimises for title and salary. Staying optimises for feedback.
If you leave every two years, you never see the second-order consequences of your own architecture. The schema you designed in year one becomes someone else’s migration in year four — and you’re not there for it. Stay, and you get the rarest thing in software: a long enough loop to learn whether you were actually right.
I shipped things at LoginRadius I was proud of, and then spent three years maintaining them. That is the education.
What the ladder actually looked like
| Years | Role | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 2012–2013 | Jr. Software Developer | Learning the product |
| 2013–2015 | Sr. Software Developer | Owning features end to end |
| 2015–2017 | Lead Application Developer | Owning a team’s output |
| 2017–2019 | Product Development Manager | Owning a roadmap |
| 2019–2021 | Director of Product Development | Owning outcomes, not output |
| 2021–2023 | AVP, Product & Engineering | Owning the org |
| 2023–2024 | VP, Product & Engineering | Owning the bet |
Each row is roughly the same job with the unit of ownership widened by one level. Nothing more dramatic than that.
Three things that transferred
Identity is not a feature. LoginRadius served 3,000 businesses and 400 million end users. At that scale, “it works on my machine” stops being funny. Everything I build now is downstream of watching auth break in a hundred countries.
Scale exposes assumptions, not bugs. Bugs you can find in review. Assumptions only surface when the 400-millionth user does something the first hundred never did.
Management is a career change, not a promotion. The skills that made me a good lead made me a mediocre first-time manager. I had to learn the second job from scratch, and I was slow about it.
Would I do it again?
Yes, with one edit: I’d have started writing things down in year two instead of year ten. Almost everything I learned at LoginRadius exists only as scar tissue. This blog is the correction.