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Artwork for The CTO Podcast with Fexingo: Technical Leadership, Architecture, and Engineering Org

The CTO Podcast with Fexingo: Technical Leadership, Architecture, and Engineering Org

Fexingo
Stripe
Gitlab
Crdts
Figma
Netflix
Notion
Shopify
Discord
Doordash
Etsy
Spotify
Datadog
Google
Rust
Elasticsearch
Uber
Cloudflare
Monzo
Google Docs
Loom

Lucas and Luna sit down in front of a whiteboard to dissect the decisions that shape technical organizations. Each episode of The CTO Podcast with Fexingo examines a specific engineering leadership challenge — from scaling a microservices architecture without creating a distributed monolith, to managing the cognitive load of a 200-engineer org, to choosing between a monorepo and polyrepo strategy ... more

PublishesDailyEpisodes97Founded2 months ago
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Artwork for The CTO Podcast with Fexingo: Technical Leadership, Architecture, and Engineering Org

Latest Episodes

In this episode of The CTO Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into the engineering challenges behind GitLab's continuous integration platform. With over 5 million CI jobs running daily in early 2026, GitLab had to redesign its job scheduling, artifact stor... more

Lucas and Luna dive into why MongoDB, after years of relying on the WiredTiger storage engine, decided to build a new storage layer from scratch. They explore the architectural trade-offs between B-trees and LSM trees, how the company handled write a... more

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how Square's engineering team rebuilt its payments processing stack to handle unreliable internet connections. They dive into the specific design decisions behind Square's offline mode — from local transaction ... more

Episode 94 of The CTO Podcast. Lucas and Luna examine the engineering behind the UK's Pensions Dashboard programme, which went live in March 2026. They walk through the core technical decisions: a federated data model where the dashboard doesn't cent... more

In this episode, Lucas and Luna dive into how Notion rebuilt its sync engine from the ground up to handle over 100 million blocks per workspace. They explore the shift from a naive JSON-based sync to a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) archit... more

This episode dives into the real technical challenge behind Figma's multiplayer architecture: not just cursor sync, but handling over 100,000 simultaneous vector objects in a single file. Lucas and Luna unpack how Figma moved from a naive OT approach... more

How Uber rebuilt its dispatch engine to handle 30 million daily rides without a single downtime event. Lucas and Luna break down the core architectural shift from a monolithic matching service to a fully distributed, event-driven system that uses pro... more

In episode 90 of The CTO Podcast, Lucas and Luna unpack the architectural story behind MongoDB's election protocol redesign. In 2023, MongoDB's replica sets could reliably handle about 10,000 writes per second per primary before election latency beca... more

Key Facts

Accepts Sponsors
Contact Information
Podcast Host
Number of Listeners
Find out how many people listen to this podcast per episode and each month.

Recent Guests

Oscar Stall
Spotify CTO at the time
Spotify
Episode: How Spotify Migrated to Google Cloud Without Breaking Discovery Weekly
Sujata Bhatia
CTO of Monzo
Monzo
Episode: Why Monzo Rewrote Its Core Banking Engine

Hosts

Lucas
Host of The CTO Podcast with Fexingo
Luna
Co-host of The CTO Podcast with Fexingo

Talking Points

Recent interactions between the hosts and their guests.

How Stripe Rebuilt Its Accounting Engine for Global Tax Compliance
Q: Could this real-time tax engine be extended to other domains?
Yes, the architecture is general enough to handle other rules-based calculations like income tax withholding or insurance premia taxes, suggesting Stripe's direction toward a broader compliance infrastructure layer.
How Stripe Rebuilt Its Accounting Engine for Global Tax Compliance
Q: What is the latency distribution and why is it important?
Average latency is 12 ms and P99 is about 45 ms; the tail latency comes from complex bundles, but overall they stay well under their 50 ms target, which was critical for maintaining user experience in real-time checkout.
How Stripe Rebuilt Its Accounting Engine for Global Tax Compliance
Q: What does the transition look like in practice?
They used a shadow mode for a month where the new engine computed tax in real time but the ledger was not posted yet. After a month with zero material differences, they switched off the old batch job and completed the cutover.
How Stripe Rebuilt Its Accounting Engine for Global Tax Compliance
Q: How did they validate that the new engine was correct before fully switching over?
They built a replay framework using six months of historical data, ran both the old batch engine and the new streaming engine, compared outputs line by line, audited 0.3% of discrepancies, and reviewed each with the tax team before cutover.
How Stripe Rebuilt Its Accounting Engine for Global Tax Compliance
Q: Why not buy an off-the-shelf tax engine from vendors like Vertex or Avalara?
Latency was the primary concern; APIs from off-the-shelf engines typically add 50–100 ms per transaction, which is unacceptable for Stripe's real-time checkout flows, especially for large marketplaces. Building the in-house FSM and DSL achieves end-to-end latency around 12 ms.

Audience Metrics

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Listeners per Episode
Gender Skew
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Frequently Asked Questions About This Podcast

What is This Podcast about and what kind of topics does it cover?

A practical deep-dive into engineering leadership and architectural strategy, focusing on real-world trade-offs behind large-scale tech decisions. Episodes explore how CTOs balance velocity, reliability, and cost when reshaping platforms, rewriting core systems, or choosing between monoliths and distributed architectures. Concrete case studies—from sunsetting complex integrations to migrating core stacks and building internal platforms—highlight decision-making frameworks, governance, risk management, and leadership dynamics. The show favors nuanced, non-splashy insights over generic “best practices,” often ending with unresolved tensions that invite listeners to apply similar thinking within their own teams.

Noteworthy angles include the ... more

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this podcast launched 2 months ago and published 97 episodes to date. You can find more information about this podcast including rankings, audience demographics and engagement in our podcast database.

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Recent guests on this podcast include:

1. Oscar Stall
2. Sujata Bhatia

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