Meta Senior Manager (M2) on Manager Career Growth, PIPs, Amazon vs Meta | Stefan Mai

The Peterman Pod

Aug 15, 2025•1 hr 31 min

--:--

Listen in podcast apps:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Download

Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app

Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

Stefan Mai was a Senior Manager (M2) with experience across Meta and Amazon. We went over his career story in growing to M2 which is equivalent to Senior Staff (IC7) in big tech. Since he started his own company now, he was happy to be fully transparent about the behind the scenes of managing in big tech.

Since he founded the interview prep company, Hello Interview, I also thought it’d be interesting to talk about trends he’s seeing in AI cheating tools and how to get offers at OpenAI/Anthropic. We discussed:

• Meta Senior Manager (M2) career growth story

• Amazon vs Meta culture

• Which company had stronger engineers

• How low performer quotas & PIPs work

• Eng vs manager career growth

• Transitioning to AI/ML as an eng

• Getting offers at OpenAI and Anthropic

• Advice for his younger self

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(00:59) Early career at Amazon

(05:46) Growth to eng manager at Amazon