The new engineering skill no one was trained for

In this episode of Distributed, Jack Hannah speaks with Scott Jones, Head of Engineering for Service Delivery at Stash, about building complex systems in a remote-first environment and why real-time collaboration matters more than ever.

Scott reflects on helping build Stash’s core banking platform in just one year, breaking down what building a bank actually means from an engineering perspective. He explains how the work was structured across teams, why individual heroics fall apart at scale, and how frequent synchronous coordination helped the team move fast without breaking things.

The conversation introduces Scott’s idea of “aggressive huddling,” a practice of using real-time communication with tools like Tuple to simulate in-office collaboration. Through concrete stories, including a critical migration issue resolved before customers noticed, Scott shows how early human coordination can prevent costly failures.

The episode also explores how AI is changing engineering work at Stash. As execution becomes faster, Scott argues that collaboration, project management, and problem framing are becoming core engineering skills, and that AI increases the need for human alignment rather than reducing it.

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Where to find Scott Jones:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-jones-bab7b713

• Website: https://www.stash.com/

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Where to find Jack Hannah:

• LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-hannah/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tuple.app/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(01:32) What it takes to build a bank

(05:24) Why the one-year timeline didn’t feel daunting

(08:52) Structuring the work across teams

(11:14) “Aggressive huddling” on Tuple

(14:08) How real-time huddling saved a failing migration

(18:47) How real-time coordination works day to day

(22:42) Why postmortems can be a collaboration red flag

(25:46) How engineers at Stash are using AI today

(31:37) The skills that engineers need now

(33:50) Why AI tools demand more collaboration

(36:07) How time is allocated in an AI-driven workflow

(38:33) The future of human-AI collaboration

(41:20) Rapid fire round

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Referenced:

• Stash: https://www.stash.com

• Forrest Gump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Gump

• Keir Lauritzen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keir-lauritzen

• Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org

• Test Driven Development: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestDrivenDevelopment.html

• Uncle Bob Martin on X: https://x.com/unclebobmartin

• Justin Martin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mythinking

• Grok: https://grok.com

• Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better: https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Money-Financial-System-Failing/dp/B0CG83QBJ6