Happy Thursday and welcome to another day in my life. This is a bittersweet post today; I am changing jobs. In 2016 I accepted an offer to join the System Engineering team with Mailchimp. The team at the time was relatively small, maybe 20-30 engineers within operations at the time. The company was hiring and growing very rapidly during this period. Within 6 months of being hired I was one of the more senior engineers on the team. A few years later, around 2019, I was promoted to Senior Engineer and changed teams, internally to work with our internal dev tooling team. This team would later become what modern organizations would consider developer experience. My day-to-day shifted from break fixes and standard operations type work to more development and infra tooling work.
Shortly after this transition the world was tossed upside down with COVID and the associated lock-downs. The office closed and everyone began to work from home. This was fine for my team at the time because we were already one of the few mostly remote teams already. The rest of the company, however, struggled to adapt.
Fast-forward to 2021 and it’s announced that Mailchimp is to be acquired by Intuit. There was a lot of concern among the general rank and file that this was going to lead to the destruction of our carefully curated culture. Many people left during this time and things were generally a little chaotic. But, for the next couple of years, things hummed along with business as usual. That was until July 2024.
In July 2024, Intuit announced that they would be doing a fairly sizeable layoff; reducing their staff by about 10%. This sent a shock through the Mailchimp employees as it was seen by many that the layoff disproportionately affected Mailchimp’s numbers. This was purely speculation and I won’t comment on it directly but to say that it was seen as a change in posture within the company and not one that many long-time Mailchimp employees liked. In addition to the layoffs, many people voluntarily left the company in the following days and weeks as a result of their shift in feelings towards the new parent company.
For the next two years, things continued along a new trajectory. Intuit, being fully invested in the AWS ecosystem, was pushing hard on Mailchimp engineering to consolidate our services in to their environment. Most of the work being done shifted from new features to lift-and-shift migrations and re-architecting of core services. After a while, the writing began to appear on the wall that those of us who worked on what was now seen as the “legacy” Mailchimp environments were going to be out of a job in short order. It was time to start figuring out what to do next.
And that leads me to today, January 22, 2026. After 10 years with Mailchimp/Intuit I have tendered my resignation. I leave the company with no ill will and wish the best to those I’ve worked with over the years who will remain. The company is shifting as all companies do and some will have to find new opportunities. I hope that many of them are able to find internal mobility moves when the time comes but I recognize that some of them will have to find new opportunities outside the company. This is just a reality of business and I wish everyone the best.
I look forward to starting the next chapter in my story. I’ve accepted an SRE position with Censys. It seems like a really good fit in terms of matching up my existing skills to their needs while also opening a lot of doors to grow in areas that I would have struggled to do within Intuit. I’m excited to get to know the new team and get the opportunity to finally work remotely, full-time.