Leopard.FYI

We hosted a STAFF-PLUS ENGINEERING DINNER in San Francisco 🌉 last week with PayJoy 🌱 and 20+ Leopard.FYI members 💜. More on the Dinner's SHARED GOAL & LEARNINGS below ⬇️⬇️ STEP 1: ARTICULATE A SHARED GOAL 🎯 - At Leopard, we see that most for women and non-binary engineers don't consider the “IC LEADERSHIP TRACK” . Management often becomes the default path for underrepresented groups, but then in the interview process they get rejected more often because they're “NOT HANDS ON ENOUGH”. - One of our GOALS this year is to make the Staff, Principal, and Lead IC PATH MORE VISIBLE AND SUPPORTED IN THE LEOPARD COMMUNITY. The dinner's purpose was clear: If we create more community for this group, we can model what the IC track looks like for more members & potentially change the ratio of the leopard community (IC vs Management) over time. STEP 2: FIGURE OUT HOW TO EXECUTE IT 🤣 - This dinner was really HARD TO ORGANIZE because there are way less Staff/Principal/ Lead level women & nb folks in San Francisco vs Senior! I was worried we wouldn't have enough people to make a dinner actually work, and it took a lot of proactive outreach on our end to get to 20 attendees (40 RSVPs) - Structurally, I think the dinner ultimately worked because of the GROUP SIZE AND CURATION. At the end of the day, Leopard community events are able to create a safe space for a specific subset of tech that has a hard time meeting each other at work. The intimate dinner format meant more folks could meet, so even though there were less people to talk to the caliber of the convos were even more targeted. STEP 3: FIND THE RIGHT EMPLOYER PARTNER 🤝 - PayJoy 🌱 ended up being the PERFECT FIT AS AN EMPLOYER PARTNER for the dinner for a bunch of reasons. They are growing their staff org in SF, but also culturally they fit a lot of the things that the Leopard community care about a lot. They are genuinely focused on doing good while doing business, and also doing things their way. You could feel it in the conversations with basically everyone on the Payjoy team who attended, there's a kindness and respect and mission drivenness that just pours out of each of them. I feel really lucky to have them as a partner, and I think there was just really good organic alignment with the Leopard community. INTERESTED IN JOINING OR HOSTING US? GET IN TOUCH 💜 If you'd like to join events like this in the future, make sure to sign up for Leopard so we know to invite you! If you're an employer who wants to co-host curated smaller events with subsets of the Leopard community, GET IN TOUCH!

"I can't recommend Leopard enough. Lexi and her team work tirelessly to help people with their resumes, run mock interviews and hold networking events. And they spent time to know me and my experience in order to match me with companies that they had already vetted. Any job-seeker who has spent hours searching the internet for a role, tailoring your resume to match it and then spending more time to apply blindly to the company, will understand what a blessing Leopard is. All the leads that popped in my inbox matched my skillset and was with companies that I would absolutely love to work for. And the icing on the cake was the community. Resume reviews, mock interviews with the team, interview prep with the members and friends who genuinely check up on you because we all understand the stress of searching for a job. I highly recommend joining this community." - Leopard Candidate Testimonial, Feb 2026

"We all did a first big step when we joined Leopard. Before that I was trying my best alone and drowning. Leopard gave me community, hope, mock interviews, help to see that it's not me having such a hard time, it's this horrible job market. It is brutal, worst I've seen since I came to US 25 years ago. It erodes ones self esteem and put one at disadvantage no matter who you are and what do you know. It's about luck and perseverance, both, least of all skills. I am not saying don't work on your skills, just the opposite, use this time to upskill, however, it's not really skills that are stopping 99% of us, it's getting our resume to the hiring manager, getting through interviews and not giving up.   Things that worked for me: Attending 🤘 Robby Grodin sessions - very helpful. Even if you are not in the hot seat, you get good feedback and sense of where things should go. Reading slack threads about companies people interview at. Joining an accountability group. That was the biggest help because we were accountable to each other every day at the set time, forcing me to work on what I say I will work on. Showing up every day on Slack and reading other peoples successful stories. Coming to Leopard meetup and actually talking to people. I was working from home for 4 years and then being unemployed and my social skills muscles were weak. It was very good to meet people face to actual face. Good luck to us all! " Leopard Wins channel, March 2026

"It's not just you - it is rough out there! The job market is extremely punishing right now. Until signing an offer I had been unemployed for about 7 months - my longest stretch of unemployment since I entered tech 15 years ago. Things were looking bleak, and I was wondering what my situation would look like if I didn't land something soon ... but I kept showing up, and doing my best (even when that didn't feel like my best) ... that sounds hand-wavy, but the truth is: it was hard. Hard to keep applying among all the rejections, hard to be patient waiting to hear about "next steps", hard to be positive and impressionable when actually doing interviews. Hard, but not impossible. The search sucks ... so don't do it alone! Taking time to continue making connections, and sharpening your skills will help - whether that's through the resources available here, or elsewhere. Last: just be yourself! It's not just what you bring to the table that's compelling to companies looking for people, but it's also the particular flavor that you bring along with the skills you possess! Be proud of who you are, and what you bring to the table! - Leopard Member's Job Search Advice for the community, March 2026

"Things I wish I'd known when I started job hunting: - Not that there's much choice, but just keep chugging. Grinding applications and interviews can feel really exhausting and hopeless, but it just takes one company. I liked to think about it like a rare drop in a video game, you only have to hit the 1 in 500 chance once. - If you were a bootcamp student, or were in any way affiliated with one, make sure you're checking up on the companies that donated to your school, companies that hired your classmates or students, anyone who might have a positive reaction to seeing your history there. - Expect at least some companies to throw time-boxed, Leetcode style challenges at you, some more practical, and some won't require a hard technical assessment at all. The gambit for technical interviews is really wide, and the interviews can get technical really fast. - You can kind of A/B test resumes with similar job postings." - Leopard member job search advice, Feb 2026

"Just stick with it, believe in yourself and your skills. you are capable, you are worthy of a company investing in you. you can do it, i believe in you and take advantage of having the leopard community and resources!!! This is an amazing place and having the mutual community support has made the whole process of job hunting so humanizing, compared to how dehumanizing it is to go through it alone. i've made a bunch of friends here too, and i will definitely be sticking around!! Huge shoutout to Anna Riza Briones and Johanne Sotto and Jewell Shanin Galdo and Jessica Powell for their hard work, and to Lexi Lewtan (Team Leopard) for the incredible community she's built, and to 🤘 Robby Grodin (Leopard Coach) for her awesome workshops." - A Leopard member's job search advice after landing a role! Feb 2026

I had so much fun hosting Lexi Lewtan and the Leopard.FYI community at the DOSS headquarters last week. We usually drive our meetups around panel discussions and a formal topic - this was one of those casual hangouts that focuses on building relations and community rather than focusing on learning. One of my favorite parts of living in San Francisco is that we get to be part of this world where you never feel alone - there's always someone going a similar journey. However, post-pandemic, the opportunities to find like minded individuals became so hard. I love the mission that Leopard has set out on - to give a genuine space for Women and Non-Binary engineers to get access to their peer group and mentors. Glad that Doss could be part of that journey to bring back meetups in the post-pandemic world. Can't wait for the next one!