Headshot of Kris DrouetKris Drouet

Kris Drouet is Vice President of Engineering with 25 years of experience building systems, leading teams, and advising executives in high-stakes, regulated industries like fintech and mortgage technology. He's the person companies call when they need someone who can sit with the C-suite in the morning, architect the solution by afternoon, and have engineers shipping it by end of sprint. Kris writes about engineering org design, build vs buy decisions, and the leadership transitions that make or break growth-stage tech orgs.

Contractor Access Under SOC 2: Provisioning Contract Engineers Without Day-One Risk

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Quiet office lobby with glass double doors, a gray bench, and an orange lanyard with a blank badge holder on a light-oak reception desk

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Under SOC 2, give a contract engineer day-one access only to what the first ticket needs: a scoped repository, a non-production environment, and named credentials with MFA. Production data, merge rights to protected branches, and break-glass wait for a second reviewer and a written approval, then … Read more

Contract Engineering Teams in Regulated Codebases: An Operating Model for VPs

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Empty glass-walled conference room with a long oak table, gray chairs, and a single plain orange folder in the center

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A mixed team in a regulated codebase works when contractors get the same written answers employees get, covering who owns each decision, who holds which access, who carries the pager, what done means, and how knowledge stays. KORE1’s engagement data puts the median contract assignment at … Read more

Who Owns the Model? Splitting AI Ownership Across Engineering, Data, and Product

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Empty meeting room with a wall of blank sticky notes divided into four quadrants by crossing strips of burnt orange tape, above a light oak table with three gray chairs

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 AI ownership works when each decision about a model gets one named owner, with product defining a correct answer, data owning what the model learns from, and engineering owning what ships and what rolls back. That split is the core of an AI operating model. Hand … Read more

Your First Skip-Level Meeting: How to Run One Without Undermining Your Managers

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Small round office table with two coffee mugs and two gray chairs pulled close, a burnt orange chair set back and empty beside the wall

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A skip-level meeting is a one-on-one or small-group conversation between a leader and their managers’ reports, without the manager present, and it works only when the leader listens for patterns and routes every decision back to its owner. Run it as a listening session, never a … Read more

Scope Creep and Roadmap Whiplash: What Changing Priorities Mid-Sprint Actually Costs

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Railway track splitting at a switch into two curves heading opposite directions, with a burnt orange switch lever beside the rails at golden hour

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Scope creep is work added or swapped in after a project is committed, and a mid-sprint priority change costs far more than the new work, because the team pays to stop, replan, reload context, and repair what it abandoned. On my worksheet, a six-engineer team taking … Read more

Merging Two Engineering Orgs: A 100-Day Integration Playbook

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Empty meeting room where an oak table with gray chairs and a walnut table with burnt orange chairs have been pushed end to end, meeting at a visible seam

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Post-acquisition engineering integration works when you merge how decisions get made before you merge code or org charts, which means one definition of done, one written priority list, and one named venue for cross-team calls within 100 days. The repositories can wait a year. The engineers … Read more

Integrating Contract Engineers Without Creating a Two-Tier Culture

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Empty conference room with eight gray chairs at a long oak table and a separate row of six chairs pushed back against the wall, one with a burnt orange seat

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Integrating contract engineers without a two-tier culture means assigning decisions by the work, not the badge, so contractors own the reversible, local calls in their area while one-way doors go to whoever will still be there when the consequences land. Every other difference between the two … Read more

Communicating With Executives: Translating Engineering Work Into Board-Level Language

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Two plain tin cans joined by a taut orange string on a walnut boardroom table with empty leather chairs behind, a picture of engineering and the board trying to hear each other

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Communicating with executives about engineering work means restating it in the four units a board already uses, which are revenue, cost, risk, and time, and putting the decision you need in the first sentence. The board isn’t going to learn your vocabulary. Theirs is short, and … Read more

Schema Evolution Without Downtime: Versioning Events People Actually Consume

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Railway switch points dividing one track into two beside an orange switch lever, representing event schema evolution without downtime

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Schema evolution is how an event’s structure changes over time without breaking the services that read it, and doing it without downtime means pairing registry compatibility checks with a known consumer list and an expand, migrate, contract rollout. The registry catches broken shapes. It can’t catch … Read more

Compliance Automation Starts in the Pipeline: Audit Evidence as a Byproduct of Delivery

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Bright orange flight data recorder resting on a steel workbench in an aircraft hangar, a stand-in for systems that record their own evidence as they run

By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Compliance automation means your delivery systems generate audit evidence as they run, with each control writing a timestamped, tamper-proof record from the system of record and a daily check flagging any control that failed. Collecting that evidence is the easy half. Proving to an auditor that … Read more

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