Why Did Ring Call Engineers Builders?

Jamie Siminoff made builder the official title for Ring engineering so people feel free to work across firmware, mobile, and backend. AI lets a firmware engineer ship a feature and integrate it, and the old specialty title was getting in the way.

Firmware used to be a real specialty around chips. Ring needed that person to stay there and not also do apps and backend. A title still changes how coworkers react. Say you are a backend engineer and pitch an idea for the app, and people answer that you do not know what you are talking about. Call the same person a builder and they feel more empowered to cross areas, come up with a feature idea even from firmware, mock it up, and build the thing all the way through. People at Ring have already shipped features that way. They have also found a bug and fixed it end to end instead of dropping a ticket into a long system.

Siminoff thinks if everyone just runs around building everything, probably nothing will get done, so the goal is still a balance against anarchy. Each person should know the area to focus on and still act like a superhero, because AI is democratizing intelligence and his job is to get the most out of the team.