#173 - Yaron Schneider: The Most Valuable Thing an Engineer Can Do Now Isn’t to Write Code

APR 20, 202644 MIN
The Way of Product with Caden Damiano

#173 - Yaron Schneider: The Most Valuable Thing an Engineer Can Do Now Isn’t to Write Code

APR 20, 202644 MIN

Description

<p></p><p><strong><em>Listen to this episode on </em></strong><a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7dy9vYUPNj3dH9lKAVDheV?si=7daa7867eead49f2"><strong><em>Spotify</em></strong></a><strong><em> or </em></strong><a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-way-of-product-with-caden-damiano/id1442980948"><strong><em>Apple Podcasts</em></strong></a></p><p></p><p></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaron-schneider-2130b7a3/">Yaron Schneider</a> is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.diagrid.io/">Diagrid</a>, where he leads the development of distributed systems platforms that power durable workflows and AI agents for cloud-native teams worldwide. Rising to prominence in the late 2010s through his work on cloud infrastructure at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.microsoft.com/">Microsoft</a>, he became known for co-creating the CNCF projects <a target="_blank" href="https://dapr.io/">Dapr</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://keda.sh/">KEDA</a>, which today serve tens of thousands of organizations building microservices and event-driven applications. As Chair of the Workflows Working Group at the <a target="_blank" href="https://agentic.ai/">Agentic AI Foundation</a>, he is widely regarded as an influential figure in defining how large-scale agentic systems are orchestrated and operated in production.</p><p>Previously, as Principal Software Engineer on <a target="_blank" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/container-apps">Azure Container Apps</a> at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.microsoft.com/">Microsoft</a>, Schneider helped design and ship a serverless platform that enabled customers to run containerized microservices and event-driven workloads without managing Kubernetes directly, driving adoption across thousands of production clusters and multi-million-dollar cloud accounts. In earlier roles on the Azure CTO Incubations team, he focused on high-scale distributed systems and developer platforms, work that culminated in Dapr’s acceptance into the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cncf.io/projects/dapr/">Cloud Native Computing Foundation</a> in 2021 and its graduation to top-tier status in 2024, alongside Kubernetes and Prometheus. By 2025, the Dapr ecosystem was engaging over 40,000 companies across finance, healthcare, retail, and SaaS, and more than 90% of surveyed developers reported measurable time savings when building distributed applications with the runtime.</p><p>Schneider’s career highlights also include serving as Division CTO at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.is.com/">ironSource</a> from 2013 to 2015, where he led engineering for high-throughput advertising and monetization systems processing billions of events per day across mobile and desktop. Earlier, as a software architect at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.superderivatives.com/">SuperDerivatives</a> and a hands-on architect at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ness.com/">Ness Technologies</a>, he worked on low-latency, mission-critical platforms in financial technology and enterprise software, gaining the deep distributed-systems experience that later shaped his open-source work. Through Dapr, KEDA, and Diagrid’s <a target="_blank" href="https://www.diagrid.io/catalyst">Catalyst</a> platform, Schneider’s contributions have helped standardize patterns such as workflow-as-code, event-driven autoscaling to and from zero, and durable agentic workflows across Kubernetes and multi-cloud environments.</p><p><em>Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.</em></p><p><em>So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.</em></p><p><em>I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.</em></p><p></p><p>Subscribe to The Way of Product</p><p></p><p><em>PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at </em><a target="_blank" href="mailto:[email protected]"><em>[email protected]</em></a><em> with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.</em></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at <a href="https://www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe</a>