I'm newer to the field, working for matured/profitable startup. My main accountability is more data engineer, building integrations and pipelines for LLM powered agents.
My direct boss is the CTO and founder. In general I like him and like working for him. But when it comes to the things I make, he gets weirdly competitive, and coming from academia, I'm not sure how to navigate this relationship since it's quite different than mentor-mentee dynamic. Sometimes it seems if I'm too successful at building something he resents me, or if I explain something to him he'll snap at me "yes, I know the difference between a REST API and query endpoint". He gets especially prickly when any of his old systems need to be touched.
All the official feedback I get from him is glowing but our actual interactions can often be sour. I've tried to tell him how much respect I have for what he's built (which I do have a lot of!).
Is this a common thing to deal with in corporate relationships?