How to Lead Engineering Teams in the AI Era: JJ Friedman on Embedded Talent
What we talked about
JJ Friedman is Director of Product Engineering at PLACE, a real estate technology company he joined through its nearly five-year run as Remine, climbing from Senior Software Engineer to Tech Lead to Director. He co-created Shipm8, a Kubernetes live health monitoring tool, and spent over seven years in parallel as a Luxury Estates Director at Compass in Beverly Hills. His degree from Occidental College is in Philosophy and Economics, not computer science, and that path shows up in how he thinks about Engineering leadership, embedded contractor teams, and where AI actually helps versus where craftsmanship still matters.
Show notes
JJ Friedman went from college basketball to real estate agent to open-source contributor to Director of Product Engineering at PLACE, climbing through senior engineer and tech lead roles at Remine along the way while running a parallel seven-year career as a Luxury Estates Director at Compass. He talks through what each promotion actually demanded of him, why he treats long-tenure embedded contractors as teammates rather than disposable vendor labor, and why he thinks craftsmanship, not typing speed, is what AI can’t replace.
What we covered
- His unlikely path into engineering: college basketball, a philosophy degree at Occidental, real estate sales, and open source contributions that got picked up by an incubator studio before he ever took a full-time engineering job.
- What each transition from senior engineer to tech lead to Director of Product Engineering at Remine actually required, including the failing two-year SSO project he turned around into a four-month launch that onboarded half a million users.
- His three-way framework for why companies hire contractors, and his own philosophy of treating embedded talent as long-tenure teammates instead of project-based or discount labor.
- The story of putting a Density Labs engineer in as tech lead of Remine’s core application, and what happened when that engineer later wanted to go full-time.
- His take on craftsmanship versus AI augmentation: why the low-level typing was never the real skill, and why teams move faster today even if the code gets a little messier.
- What he wishes more engineering leaders understood about cross-border teams, and why he’d rather hire junior engineers and grow them than avoid the friction of onboarding contractors from a different market.
About JJ
JJ Friedman is Director of Product Engineering at PLACE, a real estate technology company, where he leads product engineering after climbing from Senior Software Engineer to Tech Lead to Director over nearly five years at Remine. He co-created Shipm8, a Kubernetes live health monitoring and data visualization tool built on React Native, and is a Triplebyte Certified Generalist Software Engineer. He spent over seven years in parallel as a Luxury Estates Director at Compass in Beverly Hills, and holds an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Economics from Occidental College.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jj-friedman
Episode 165 of the PreVetted Podcast.