S10 E14: The Empathetic Engineering Culture: Scaling High-Performance Tech Teams and Mitigating Security Risks Without Dev Burnout with Eric Müller, VP of Engineering & CISO at Presence
episodePreviously titled “S10 E14: Eric Müller, Presence” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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We had a deadline. We had overcommitted. There was an expectation that the work was going to be, that we were going to get a release out that day. I'm sitting at my desk. The product manager has his desk next to me. I looked at everyone and said, all right, we're clearly not going to launch today. The product manager raised his eyebrow at me and I said, we're not going to get this done. So how do we solve this? And we'll launch when we launch. I was going to go to our boss and say, I'm sorry. We did our best, and it's on me, and it is what it is. My willingness to say, look, I screwed up, it's on me, it took the pressure off of them. And suddenly, people are relaxed, identify the source of the problem, and we actually launched.
I'm Eric Mueller, VP of Engineering at CISO at present.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Who share what it takes to change an industry. Who built the teams that have their back. Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as a group. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, my dear. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Code Story. I'm your host, Noah Labpart. And today, how Eric Mueller... leads the engineering and security charge at a business who aims to be your digital partner. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy.
Grow your API user adoption and improve engineering velocity with friction-free integration experiences. With Speakeasy's platform, you can now automatically generate SDKs in 10 languages and Terraform providers in minutes. Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory and generate your first SDK for free. This message is sponsored by QA Wolf. QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship five times faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes. With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Grotta, and Autotrader, you're in good hands. Join the Wolf Pack at qawolf.com. Eric Mueller lives in San Francisco and explored many different paths before landing in tech. Architecture, photography, but ultimately, he settled into the creativity, building, and planning aspects of creating software. Outside of tech, he's married with one kid and a great trade-off with his wife. He does all the cooking while she does the cleaning.
He still loves photography and takes pictures regularly with his Olympus OM-1. Eleven years ago, Eric joined his current venture as a consultant, taking on projects and delivering value. He was brought on board six to seven months later and started down the path where he would lead the engineering and security arms of your partner in creating digital products. This is Eric's creation story at Presence.
Presence is a digital consultancy. So we build digital products for folks and we really like to make that distinction in digital products. We're not really focused on building like marketing websites or anything like that. Our goal is to help companies take an idea or a business or a product and put it into the digital space. And that could be obviously on the web, it could be mobile devices. We've done IoT implementations in the past, and we can help a company think through a strategy, we hook them up with designers, but more importantly, as we get in there, we really push forward on their actual build, what they're gonna put out there in this space. We've worked with small companies, we've worked with large companies, so startups all the way up to large enterprises.
Personally, I'm VP of Engineering and our CISO primarily been focused on building out our team, working on our process, and then making sure that the teams are able to deliver for our clients. And then on the security side, helping our clients if they have any questions around security, and then also drove our SOC 2 process. So we've had four audits.
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