The rise of the ‘people engineer’: HR’s next AI-era role

“About two years ago, it became pretty obvious, with the rate that it was becoming easier to produce software, that maybe we should be hiring engineers or even allocating internal resources, whether that’s an actual engineer on the people team or getting capacity from a few engineers,” Garcia said.

From software engineer to people leader

Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, Garcia grew up in Miami and double majored in mechanical engineering and computer science at MIT. Her career took her through engineering roles at Facebook and Apple, product management at Google, and finance at Two Sigma, a quantitative hedge fund, and an early-stage venture capital fund.

She joined Warp as one of its first operational hires, when the company had about 10 people. Today, it has 76. Her initial focus was building a recruiting funnel and engine.

“That initially started this waterfall of owning a bunch of HR and people initiatives, and really just gaining so much love and respect for the industry and the role in general,” Garcia said.

She said the move also came with respect for what she didn’t know.