Leading Through Uncertainty: How Wix Engineering Navigates Growth, AI, and the Unknown
"We’ve entered the AI age. Bold and strong leadership isn't just an advantage, it's a necessity!" - Aviran Mordo
Introduction: When The Old Playbooks of Leadership No Longer Applied
We often imagine engineering leadership as a series of decisions: what to build, how to scale, which tools to adopt. But in practice, the most defining moments happen when you don’t have the answers. When the market shifts, the world changes, or the technology rewrites its own rules.
That’s the reality Yaniv Even-Haim, Wix CTO, and Aviran Mordo, VP Engineering, have faced while leading Wix through a decade and a half of massive growth - and more recently, into the age of AI.
In a rare, behind-the-scenes conversation, the two reflect not just on what they did, but on how they led - and what they learned when the old playbooks no longer applied.
From a Small Team to a Shared Culture
Back in 2010, Wix’s Engineering was just two teams. Leadership was immediate and personal - close to the code and the people. "We were mainly focused on creating the engineering foundation and the culture," Yaniv shares.
That early investment in values became a critical force multiplier as the company grew. They weren’t just scaling architecture - they were scaling trust, decision-making, and ownership.
Over time, leadership shifted from making decisions to enabling others to make them - faster, clearer, and with autonomy.
Crisis Mode: What COVID Taught Us About Leadership
When COVID hit in 2020, remote work wasn’t a trend - it was survival. And it pushed every engineering org to ask: can we still move forward if we’re not in the same room?
For Yaniv and Aviran, the answer wasn't more meetings or tighter control. It was in distributed trust.
They learned how to keep people aligned without micromanagement. How to communicate vision without visibility. And how to support momentum when stability was the goal. These lessons later became foundational as Wix embraced AI - another form of distributed, fast-moving change.
The AI Shift: Not Just Tech - A Mindset
Unlike many companies, Wix didn’t treat AI as a feature. It treated it as a cultural shift. The transformation didn’t begin with a strategy doc - it started with engineers, curious and empowered, building things on their own.
"It’s a big mindset shift", Yaniv notes, describing how even build-time systems had to be rethought in the age of AI.
The transition touched not just code, but also process and culture - shifting the way engineers experiment, own projects, and even perceive their roles. Teams that had never touched machine learning found themselves learning new tools, working with LLMs, and embedding GenAI into real products.
"We’ve changed our mindset", he adds - pointing to the organization-wide rethinking that made experimentation feel possible, even at scale.
Balancing Experimentation with High Standards
As the excitement around GenAI exploded, another tension emerged: how do you keep room for rapid experimentation, without compromising on engineering standards?
The answer wasn’t to slow things down - but to create structure around chaos.
Teams were encouraged to build, but also to evaluate. Prototypes became launchpads, not liabilities. And the culture reinforced something subtle but vital: you can move fast and build right - if you’re thoughtful about where you take risks.
In other words: freedom doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means knowing where and how to raise it.
Hiring for Potential, Not Perfection
As AI became a core part of Wix Engineering’s strategy, the company quickly realized that traditional recruitment processes were no longer enough.
The pace of change made it difficult to define fixed roles or rely on predefined skillsets. Instead of chasing rare AI experts, the team focused on building talent from within. They launched broad, organization-wide training programs designed to help existing engineers adapt - from learning LLMs to acquiring new AI-related skills. The goal wasn’t to create specialists overnight, but to foster a culture of continuous learning and hands-on exploration.
This internal transformation allowed teams to move faster and stay aligned, even as the technology evolved. More importantly, it reframed how leadership viewed talent: not as a static asset, but as something dynamic, adaptable, and scalable.
In a world where the tools change monthly, what matters most isn’t what people already know - it’s how ready they are to learn what’s next.
The New Developer Skillset
So what skills actually matter in the age of AI?
According to both leaders, it’s not about becoming a data scientist overnight. It’s about learning how to collaborate with AI - how to work in new workflows, ask better questions, and understand how to evaluate what AI gives you back.
In this new world, skills like prompt design, critical evaluation, AI-aware debugging, and ML system intuition become part of every engineer’s toolbox - whether they’re frontend, backend, or platform.
And there is a deeper layer when talking about the most important skills for developers these days - to be a self-learner. Someone who can pick up a topic tool or a new technology and learn it by himself or herself.
Final Thought: Leadership Means Letting Go, With Intention
If one theme quietly threads through the entire conversation between Yaniv and Aviran, it’s this: leadership isn’t about holding tighter - it’s about creating clarity when things are unclear.
Whether they were scaling the company, navigating remote work during COVID, or pushing through the ambiguity of AI, both leaders kept coming back to the same approach - trust the team, build strong foundations, and be willing to rethink your role as a leader.
"Leadership is changing", Yaniv says. That applies as much to software as it does to organizations.
In a world that’s moving faster than any single roadmap can keep up with, leadership becomes less about decisive control - and more about enabling decisions to happen in the right places, at the right time, with the right mindset.
It’s not about being the hero. It’s about building a system that doesn’t need one.
You can also Watch Yaniv Even-Haim and Aviran Mordo talk about leadership in their latest podcast episode - AI-Driven Leadership: Navigating Change, Driving Innovation:
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