You don’t have ICs anymore, you have managers (Emilie Schario)
Emilie Schario is co-founder and head of product and engineering at Kilo Code, the open-source, model-agnostic coding agent platform that Anaconda acquired in July 2026. Before Kilo, she was an early member of GitLab's data team, ran the data org at Netlify, spent a year as data-strategist-in-residence at Amplify Partners, and founded Turbine, an ERP startup later acquired by Settle. She joins Tristan Handy for Season 9 of The Analytics Engineering Podcast, our season on Analytics x Agents. They cover "kilo speed" and the org design that makes it real (about 20 engineers, one product hire, every engineer owning their own area with a team of AI agents behind them), why Kilo bets on being model-agnostic across more than 500 models instead of tying itself to one lab, the Kilo founding story with Sid Sijbrandij and Scott Breitenother, and Emilie's argument that data people, already used to being pulled in a dozen directions at once, may be better prepared than software engineers for a world where everyone manages a portfolio of agents. 🎧 Listen on your favorite app: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4BKMMeVXk4jJnAQSqGSJvE Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-analytics-engineering-podcast/id1574755368 Read the full episode page: https://roundup.getdbt.com/ 👤 Guest: Emilie Schario, co-founder and head of product and engineering at Kilo Code 🎙️ Host: Tristan Handy, co-founder of dbt Labs Chapters: 0:00 Welcome, and Emilie's podded bio 2:05 What "kilo speed" means 5:55 The product-engineer model: one PM, 20 engineers 8:03 "You don't have a bunch of ICs anymore, you have managers" 8:28 Is this the death of the junior software engineer? 12:01 Emilie's path: Smile Direct Club, Doist, GitLab, Netlify 17:28 Founding Turbine, and the lesson about NetSuite 22:34 The Kilo founding story: Sid's call, and "temporary" 27:08 How Kilo differs from Claude Code or Codex 34:37 Kilo's open source roots: Cline, Roo, and a fork of a fork 38:11 Working with model labs before launch 44:53 What's the Kilo business model? 47:02 The right model for the task, not the cheapest one 52:09 The flip: data people as natural multi-threaded managers The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at [email protected] with comments and guest suggestions. #analyticsengineering #dbt #aiagents #agenticengineering #dataengineering