In the ever-evolving tech landscape, remote work has emerged as a powerful engine for creativity, reshaping traditional roles and enabling new modes of leadership. Leading this shift is Sophia Willows, Head of Engineering at Rye. Nestled in the picturesque environment of New Zealand, Sophia demonstrates how remote work can lead to creative breakthroughs while fostering global connectivity.
Sophia’s role at Rye transcends her managerial title, embodying a strategic approach to making remote work an advantage. “Remote work is very different from working in person. You get a lot of communication for ‘free’ when you’re in person—you can just look over your shoulder and see what the team is doing. When working remotely, all of your communication needs to be intentional,” she observes. This intentional communication allows Sophia to steer Rye’s engineering efforts efficiently from afar, showcasing a model of leadership that breaks geographical barriers.
Leading remotely from New Zealand
Working remotely from New Zealand has significantly shaped Sophia’s leadership approach at Rye, requiring her to emphasize more intentional communication compared to in-person work. “You get a lot of communication for ‘free’ when you’re in person,” she explains, highlighting the ease of on-site interactions. Remote work, however, demands a more structured and deliberate approach.
To navigate this, Sophia relies heavily on asynchronous communication, particularly given the timezone differences between her and the rest of the team. “The rule is always to increase asynchronous communication and decrease synchronous communication,” she states. She recently led a workshop on remote communication best practices, ensuring the team avoids falling into bad habits.
Revamping Rye’s docs for success
Revamping Rye’s documentation website presented a unique set of challenges for Sophia, largely due to the company’s engineering-led approach. Without product managers, Rye relies on its talented engineers to solve tough problems. However, this focus on technical expertise resulted in a documentation site overly centered on API reference material. “When I started working at Rye, our documentation website was a good reflection of this—it focused on API reference material to the exclusion of all else,” Sophia explains.
To address this, she introduced the diátaxis framework, emphasizing the need for diverse documentation types: tutorials, guides, explainers, and references. By incorporating all four categories, she aimed to create a well-rounded documentation experience serving multiple audiences. “Over Indexing on one in particular doesn’t work so well,” she notes, highlighting the importance of balancing technical depth with accessibility for different user needs.
Solving GraphQL challenges at Rye
At Rye, adopting GraphQL over the more commonly used REST API has presented both opportunities and challenges for Sophia and her team. While GraphQL offers more flexibility, allowing API consumers to tailor the data they receive, it can also lead to poor decisions if not guided properly. “It’s much more like going to Subway—you get to build your own sandwich,” Sophia explains. Ensuring users stay on the golden path and avoid assembling inefficient queries becomes a challenge.
To tackle this, Sophia emphasizes “dogfooding”—having her team use their own API to build tools internally. This practice helps identify issues that might have slipped through peer review and allows the team to empathize with customers. “If our API is too hard to use for the people who are building it day in and day out, then that’s a good sign that we’ve missed the mark,” she says. By stress-testing their tools internally, the team continuously improves the product and delivers a better user experience.
AI lessons shaping API leadership
Leading Crimson Education’s AI team has deeply influenced Sophia’s approach at Rye, despite the stark contrast between managing fast-paced AI projects and building a single API product. At Crimson, new AI capabilities were developed rapidly, often on a weekly basis, which required a heightened awareness of risk and uncertainty. Sophia notes that most AI projects struggle because they are difficult to productize, an observation supported by a recent Gartner survey, teaching her the value of careful upfront planning. “If you don’t understand your data going in, you’ll just fail,” she emphasizes.
At Rye, where the focus is on long-lasting API designs, this meticulous approach proves invaluable. The lessons Sophia learned about managing complexity and uncertainty in AI now guide her in making thoughtful, well-planned decisions. By applying these insights, she ensures that her team’s API designs are robust and sustainable, avoiding pitfalls that could lead to failure later.
Building a collaborative remote team
To foster collaboration within a geographically dispersed team, Sophia emphasizes an asynchronous writing culture at Rye. Each new project starts with a detailed design document created by the lead engineer, which is peer-reviewed by other senior engineers before execution. This process ensures transparency and knowledge sharing across the team. “We have a policy that DMs are only to be used for socializing or sensitive personal matters,” Sophia explains. This encourages work-related discussions to happen in public Slack channels, enhancing team-wide knowledge transfer.
Rye also embraces radical candor, where team members provide honest feedback without hesitation, fostering a culture of trust and mutual respect. Regular synchronous meetings like “eng sync up” and the interactive “draw Rye” sessions further strengthen collaboration. In “draw Rye,” team members take turns presenting system components while another draws the architecture in real-time, offering both entertainment and valuable insights. Sophia regards these practices as essential for creating one of the most collaborative teams she’s ever worked with.
Prioritizing quality in developer tools
In the world of developer tooling, where customers are often capable of building their own solutions, maintaining high quality is non-negotiable. Sophia is clear about Rye’s uncompromising focus on delivering top-notch products. “If we ship a subpar product then the engineers using our API will feel it,” she explains, recognizing that even slight missteps can push developers to try and create their own tools.
To uphold this standard, Rye prioritizes quality over speed in every project. When timelines are tight or competing priorities arise, the team extends deadlines or scales back project scope to ensure the final product meets high standards. “Quality only ever moves up at Rye,” Sophia notes, underscoring the company’s commitment to delivering tools that engineers can trust.
Customer feedback driving innovation
Initially, Rye took an algorithmic approach to project prioritization, relying on weighted criteria like “alignment” and “risk” to guide development. This method, however, produced broad but shallow features that lacked depth. Particularly in areas like ordering, critical edge cases were left unsupported. “The luster wore off quickly when they tried using new features and ran up against limitations,” Sophia admits, acknowledging customer frustration.
In response, Rye shifted to a more customer-centric approach, focusing on refining and deepening their offerings. “We’re now much more opinionated about what we’ll build next,” Sophia explains. By prioritizing polishing features and releasing multiple versions before moving on to the next big idea, Rye better meets customer expectations, delivering solutions with greater depth and reliability.
The future of online commerce APIs
Looking forward, Sophia predicts a surge in developer tools built around GraphQL, a technology with significant potential for companies like Rye. However, a major challenge remains: the limited availability of high-quality GraphQL APIs as models. “I like to think that Rye’s API will end up becoming the go-to example of GraphQL API design, much like Stripe is for REST,” Sophia shares, underscoring Rye’s ambition to lead in this space.
As the online commerce landscape continues to evolve, she envisions a rise in powerful API offerings built on Rye’s infrastructure. Companies advancing contextual commerce through innovations like shoppable video already use Rye as their base layer. According to Sophia, this trend will accelerate as more developer tooling companies rely on Rye’s platform, driving the next wave of innovation in online commerce.
Sophia has been pivotal in Rye’s growth through her strategic remote leadership. By blending technical expertise with empathetic leadership, Sophia explores new possibilities within online commerce developer tools. Working remotely, she not only navigates time zone challenges but also uses them to establish a company culture focused on global integration. Her emphasis on asynchronous communication fosters innovation beyond traditional office settings. She anticipates that remote work will become increasingly essential to tech, with Rye poised to lead in developing GraphQL tools. “We’re going to see a lot more developer tooling built with GraphQL,” she forecasts, envisioning Rye setting industry benchmarks similar to leaders like Stripe.
