Curiosity may have killed the cat, but leaders at these 14 fast-growing Chicago companies say that staying curious is the key to thriving as a technical team member.
At these featured companies, maintaining an inquisitive nature looks like asking colleagues questions, staying open and empathetic with clients and demonstrating passion for expanding one’s technical expertise. For many leaders, fostering a learning-friendly culture results in significant benefits across the organization.
“Curiosity drives exploration, inspires passion and fuels collaboration with team members across different functions,” said Ryan Horner, technology managing director at One North. “When we do our best work, it is because the collective team approached a client problem with an open mind and a healthy dose of curiosity.”
Team members with curious mindsets are also quick to identify and resolve gaps in their company’s products or solutions, thoroughly exploring the complex causes of technical issues rather than addressing superficial bugs.
“We want people who have a deep desire to build knowledge and understand the ‘why’ so we can develop better solutions,” said Chhay Tea, chief technology officer at HealthJoy. “It’s typically easy to fix the surface-level symptom, but we want individuals who will go deeper, try to understand the root cause and fix the problem at the source.”
Spanning a range of quickly evolving industries — including AI, trading, healthtech and more — these companies need people who maintain a positive, friendly attitude toward customers and team members in the face of changes and challenges. They are seeking talented engineers, data scientists, product experts and more.
Built In Chicago connected with these 14 technical leaders to learn more about how to land a coveted spot on their rapidly expanding teams and what exciting projects you can expect to tackle once there.
As its business grows rapidly, Peapod Digital Labs, an e-commerce partner for grocery retailers, wants to modernize its current platform. To do so, the company is searching for positive problem solvers who are energized by technical challenges.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
One of the most important traits a candidate can have is a great attitude. A positive outlook can lead to creative problem-solving, and it can inspire team members as well.
It’s also vital for a successful candidate to have the energy to take on challenges, work through problems and think critically when it comes to handling tough situations.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
The biggest project I would say is our modernization of the current platform. It’s basically a must, as it will strengthen the foundation for a lot of enterprise initiatives, allowing them to be successful.
Our business is growing rapidly, and we need a strong base on which to continue building. In addition, this project will enable us to move at the pace we need to keep up with competition — and surpass them!
Peapod Digital Labs works to create a culture of oneness and caring where we have each other’s backs and earn our successes together.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
The word that comes to mind is community. We want everyone to look forward to the time we spend together as coworkers, to be supportive of each other and to take pride in our collective work.
Peapod Digital Labs works to create a culture of oneness and caring where we have each other’s backs and earn our successes together. This helps us to continue growing as individuals and as a team.
Best known as a big name manufacturer for construction and farming equipment, John Deere is also an innovator in artificial intelligence, cloud software and more. As the company strives to improve its digital customer experience using AI-driven personalization, it is looking for curious technical team members who aren’t afraid to take risks.
What character traits should a successful candidate have to land a spot on your team?
Being innovative and curious. We need someone who is willing to explore independently and take risks, leveraging the power of analytics, AI and machine learning to deliver solutions that improve our digital customer experience.
We value an individual who brings a new and different perspective to the team. Diversity unlocks innovative solutions to everyday problems. Inclusion empowers people to pursue their perspectives and try out their ideas and solutions.
We’re also looking for someone who is not shy to explore new ways to solve a problem, a person who is curious and embraces failing fast to learn and improve. This allows our team to unlock creative ways to solve real-world problems.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
John Deere e-commerce is focused on creating an integrated digital customer experience with our dealer channel, reaching the right customer at the right time using AI-driven personalization.
John Deere can reduce data silos to create a cutting-edge data product that enables advanced personalization. This shows our customers that we understand their needs and lifestyles and helps us develop a closer relationship with them by focusing on an integrated digital experience that customers expect.
John Deere and our dealers leverage the power of analytics and AI to inform business decisions, curate content and personalize a customer experience to deliver differentiated value to enable their lives to leap forward.
My team is empowered to bring their true and authentic selves to work and to feel psychologically safe to voice their thoughts, ideas and opinions.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Empowered. My team is empowered to bring their true and authentic selves to work and to feel psychologically safe to voice their thoughts, ideas and opinions.
At the end of the day, we hire top talent. They are smart, and they don’t need me to tell them how to do their job. I hire them to bring their knowledge to the table and evolve the status quo.
This goes back to my first answer around wanting them to be curious and try things to unlock creativity and innovation. Without empowerment, this is not possible.
In today’s world, organizations need innovation in order to sustain and differentiate their market value; without empowerment, innovation will be limited.
Over the next year, IMC Trading, a proprietary trading firm, is prioritizing continuing to update and iterate on its technological tools. To ensure it maintains its cutting-edge technology, the fintech company is looking for curious, collaborative technical team members who show excitement for learning new things and advancing their career growth.
What character trait should a successful candidate have to land a spot on your team?
The traits that will help you succeed at IMC are collaboration, curiosity and a desire to learn.
We’re looking for people with a strong ability to communicate their ideas and have productive discussions. We win together, we succeed together and we thrive together.
Additionally, being excited and interested in continuously learning new things is the key to career growth at IMC. Our teams are filled with curious individuals who take initiative and seek new information daily.
The traits that will help you succeed at IMC are collaboration, curiosity and a desire to learn.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Cutting-edge technology is at the heart of everything we do. On the technical side, one of our main focuses as we grow is ensuring our tools are as up to date as possible. This involves cleaning up technical debt and constantly updating and iterating.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
I would describe our tech team culture as driven. We’re an energetic team who strives to accomplish every single objective we set. Every day, we come to work excited to move forward toward our common goals and projects.
Enova is a fintech company that provides online financial services. Following its 2020 acquisition of small business lending company OnDeck, Enova has focused on integrating its financial technology teams and systems. Moving forward, leaders are aiming to optimize the teams’ combined technology footprint, and they need curious candidates who lean into the company’s culture of experimentation to help get the job done.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Curiosity is hugely important to our teams here at Enova. We definitely gravitate toward candidates who show a consistent desire to challenge themselves, learn new technologies and take chances.
Less experienced folks often demonstrate this through coursework or volunteer projects, internships, or certifications and boot camps. For our experienced hires, we like to see folks open to new assignments and willing to step into a difficult problem that their team or company may be facing.
We have a culture of experimentation at Enova, so being willing to ask hard questions and take some chances in your work; it’s just as important to us as having the “right answer.”
As a large and growing financial technology company with seven different brands, we move fast and definitely want folks who will enjoy the ride with us!
We have a culture of experimentation at Enova, so being willing to ask hard questions and take some chances in your work; it’s just as important to us as having the ‘right answer.’”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Early into the Covid-19 pandemic, we made our most significant acquisition to date with the purchase of OnDeck, the largest online small business lender in our space.
Integrating our separate financial technology teams and systems has been a focus of our technology team since the fall of 2020. Now that we have integrated our teams and technologies, our focus for 2023 will be optimizing our combined technology footprint across cloud, physical data centers, customer contact centers, cybersecurity and software development.
This work will involve every tech team at Enova and will set us up for continued growth across all of our brands for years to come. It’s an incredibly exciting time to jump on board, whether your expertise is in security, data or software engineering, physical or cloud infrastructure, or technical project and product management.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Ownership is the word I would use to describe our tech team culture.
At Enova, we have five values — customer first, best answer wins, operate as an owner, accountable for results and top talent and teamwork. I chose ownership because we want everyone on our team to operate as an owner by thinking big, moving fast and using resources like they’re their own.
It doesn’t matter what level you are on your team, if you see a challenge or a problem, we want you to speak up and recommend an approach or solution.
We encourage everyone to own their careers at Enova, too. We don’t have pre-described career plans or timelines. Instead, we give everyone the flexibility and encouragement to pursue their career goals through individualized promotion plans, tech exchanges (month-long rotations to another team), tech fellowships (month-long research projects) or outside training.
We don’t want our team wondering what’s next for them in terms of assignments or roles, and instead want them to own these conversations with managers and leaders. I believe that our ownership culture brings out the best in teams, so that everyone can do their best work while growing their technical skills, business acumen and career at Enova.
Cat Digital, the digital arm of heavy machinery company Caterpillar, is tackling a major digital investment: transforming its end-to-end e-commerce stack. To help accomplish this ambitious undertaking, leaders are seeking inquisitive, empathetic technical team members who have a bias toward action.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Inquisitiveness. We encourage our entire team — from product managers to solution architects to software engineers — to really empathize and understand our end customers, their businesses and what makes them successful.
When we understand the trigger events that cause our customers to need aftermarket services and support, the steps our customers take to resolve them and the outcomes our customers are after, we put ourselves in the best position to design and develop digital solutions that our customers will benefit from and enjoy using.
Pairing inquisitiveness with a bias toward action, our team makes significant contributions to our end customers that help improve their productivity and reduce owning and operating costs, while also driving brand loyalty to Caterpillar.
Pairing inquisitiveness with a bias toward action, our team makes significant contributions to our end customers that help improve their productivity and reduce owning and operating costs.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We are in the process of a major e-commerce transformation, as we’ve continued to increase our investments in our digital capabilities. We are modernizing our end-to-end e-commerce technology stack, including taking all our platforms to the cloud, upgrading our user interface framework, designing and deploying a new design system for use across mobile and web and introducing our first-ever native app for e-commerce.
We are upping our game in the creation of meaningful digital content for our customers, expanding our digital marketing, SEO and paid media capabilities, and using data analytics and insights to drive our product roadmap and conversion rates.
Delivering a significantly improved e-commerce experience — spanning from our retail customers with only one to three machines to our large fleet customers with dedicated aftermarket parts procurement staff — is critical to Caterpillar’s services growth strategy.
Today, Caterpillar dealers sell $10 million in dealer parts to users through e-commerce per business day. And we have very significant growth ambitions. Ensuring that our customers have the best e-commerce experience is what our team works on every day, and it is rewarding to see directly how we contribute to our customers’ successes as well as our enterprise goals.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Connected. Within Cat Digital and our e-commerce teams, we work hard to build a culture that is connected in many definitions of the word.
Connected to the customer, helping our team members understand our customers and their workflow, what defines their success and how we can contribute to it. Connected to our goals and strategy, as our teams perform best when they understand how their work contributes to Caterpillar’s strategic objectives.
Connected to the digital industry and the latest tech trends. We empower our teams to participate in industry events and test new technologies to find ways to continuously innovate in digital.
Connected to each other in ways that best work for each individual. We’ve fully embraced a hybrid workplace and are finding ways to mix in-person and virtual events to support critical projects, team-building events and career growth and development opportunities to help each of our team members grow.
Finally, I have to say, connected to our equipment. With more than 1.2 million Internet of Things connected assets sharing data each day, we are always finding new ways to create value through insights and analytics from our connected population.
The technology experience team at PEAK6, a fintech company focused on innovative trading, will transition next year to being an advisory group focused on identifying and resolving technology gaps across the firm’s businesses.
While technical expertise is certainly important, customer service skills are what Patrick Cummings says he focuses most on when interviewing prospective hires for the technology experience team.
What’s one skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
I look for people’s natural passion to demonstrate a customer-focused mindset. Technical aptitude can be measured and assessed, while customer service skills need to be honed and perfected.
During an interview, I look for a conversation to flow smoothly, as if we’ve known each other before the interview. This indicates if someone is good at collaborating and articulating issues as they arise. Plus, people who are comfortable typically react appropriately to potentially stressful technical situations.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
In 2023, my robust team will transition into a technical advisory group for our businesses across the firm and an array of industries.
While we continue to maintain and support our firmwide initiatives and platforms, we will now also focus on identifying information technology gaps and risks within our businesses. The technology team at PEAK6 will partner with our counterparts to resolve any identified needs or issues in real time.
We actively strive to employ a diverse group of people to provide multiple viewpoints to solve the challenges presented to our department.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Selecting one word is difficult. Words I immediately think of are compassionate, diligent, passionate, cohesive and fun; yet, the word I would ultimately select for the PEAK6 team is diverse.
My department is rooted in six strategic vision areas. Everything we do ties back to those six areas. The area I hold closest to my chest is for my team to be a destination for talent.
We actively strive to employ a diverse group of people to provide multiple viewpoints to solve the challenges presented to our department. It makes our approach more holistic and robust when providing solutions.
Vivid Seats, an online ticket marketplace for live events, is enhancing its rewards offering to better personalize its client and seller experiences. To aid in these efforts, leaders are searching for software engineers who are passionate about learning and designing customer-centered solutions.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
The ideal software engineer for our team has a passion for learning new skills and abilities. They not only want to learn about the latest technologies but also about innovative ways that we can utilize those technologies to enhance the customer and seller experience on our platform and, ultimately, create business value for Vivid Seats.
At Vivid Seats, our ability to be quick, nimble and decisive continues to play an important role in our success. As a company, and especially within the engineering department, we consistently pursue new technologies and apply them to empower our customers to find the ticket that gets them to the live event that will make lasting memories.
A successful candidate will thrive at Vivid Seats if they combine both a love of learning and a passion for designing and building highly scalable solutions.
A successful candidate will thrive at Vivid Seats if they combine both a love of learning and a passion for designing and building highly scalable solutions.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
There are so many exciting initiatives happening both now and into 2023. From enhancing our Vivid Seats rewards offering to personalizing the customer journey and creating an even better seller experience, we are always committed to raising the bar.
As we plan for the future, we are identifying the right solutions, aligning and executing faster and better, with an equal focus on speed and quality. To achieve the scale and performance we require, this will involve leveraging new and exciting technologies.
Remember that whole thing about the best engineer candidates needing a desire to learn new technologies? This is a prime example of working together as a team to innovate, experiment, learn, grow and, ultimately, deliver something special.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Trusting. We have to trust each other. No team can perform at its best without a foundation of true trust and respect.
The Vivid Seats engineering team exhibits this every day, as witnessed through collaborative design sessions that provide time for everyone’s ideas to be considered, constant open communication between engineering teams to keep everyone up to date and aligned on what’s important for the business, and trusting that each of us is doing what is necessary to win as a team.
It’s a team sport. As a team, we win or we stumble, learn and advance toward winning together — it’s just that simple. Trust is the fundamental cultural trait of the Vivid Seats engineering team.
Wolverine Trading is a company specializing in proprietary trading, asset management, order execution services and other financial services. In 2023, the firm is working to improve input data feeds that are used across the company to power trading decisions. Leaders at the fintech company value people who strive for continuous improvement and are quick to identify and iterate on their software’s areas for improvement.
What’s one skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Our team members place significant emphasis on continuous improvement. Working in a highly competitive industry means that we need to quickly identify and iterate on areas for improvement in our software from latency and logic perspectives. Otherwise, one can quickly fall behind the competition.
This extends into our development practices and team processes as well. We always strive to leave our codebase cleaner than we found it and seek to develop new features in a way that can be easily integrated into other strategies as necessary.
We always strive to leave our codebase cleaner than we found it and seek to develop new features in a way that can be easily integrated into other strategies as necessary.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Our team builds frameworks that enable us to rapidly iterate on new opportunities that the firm is exploring. 2023 brings numerous projects that aim to improve latency in our systems and improve logic in our strategies, but the focal point of these efforts is on improving input data feeds that are used across the firm to drive the millions of trading decisions we make every day.
It’s energizing to be part of a project that can make a big impact on not just the strategies that our team supports but on the performance of the firm as a whole.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Collaborative. Wolverine has multiple development teams sharing the same codebase, which means there are plenty of opportunities to reuse and augment existing frameworks to adapt them to new business purposes. The emphasis on cross-team communication is strong, and it’s especially beneficial when multiple teams are working toward the same internal or external deadline.
Wolverine doesn’t have a project management layer between engineering and the trading desk, which means that, as developers, we’re continuously working directly with the desk to prioritize projects such that our work maximizes impact on the strategy in question and, in turn, the firm as a whole.
Developers take initial requests for new features or strategy changes and will work with stakeholders to iterate on the idea, evaluating technical and non-technical trade-offs as necessary.
Level Ex, a medical video game studio, creates games, software and a streaming platform to help train medical professionals through play. Lead Senior Software Engineer Matt Knowles views a flexible attitude and strong people skills as essential to the job — just as much as technical expertise.
What skill sets should a successful candidate have to land a spot on your team?
On my team, your attitude and people skills are just as important as your technical ability.
It’s important to have a “no problem” attitude because agility is a must in our field. There are shifting challenges and priorities all the time, and developers need to be able to respond quickly and with confidence.
Understanding and embracing change as a reality of the work is key to being a contributing member of the team. When you can address any challenge that comes your way with confidence, you’re building the whole team up. Your level of confidence can help or hinder your team almost as much as the work you deliver.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Level Ex is one of a kind — we’re a medical video game studio. Our suite of games, software and in-house developed game streaming platform all enable our mission to advance the practice of medicine through play. We’re creating multiplayer experiences supporting up to 400 doctors playing at the same time together.
Being able to deploy and run these events anywhere around the world and have players across the globe interacting with each other is a huge technical challenge, but it’s exciting because the tech we’re developing allows us to reach more players and facilitate experiences that doctors will not forget.
A single fun and memorable game experience can drive a player to seek out other Level Ex games and spread the word to more of their colleagues in the medical field until one day, in the near future, play is viewed as the most effective way to learn and train.
In the coming year, we will be expanding our ever-growing library of games that train medical professionals on medical procedures. We support procedures from cataract surgery to minimally invasive screw replacement in the spine. Walking the steps to a complete knee replacement for the first time is a right of passage here.
Priorities shift and change, but we are all committed to making the technology ecosystem that is Level Ex better every day.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Relentless. Priorities shift and change, but we are all committed to making the technology ecosystem that is Level Ex better every day.
Sustained effort and holding ourselves accountable to a level of quality really make a difference. It can be hard to see the incremental steps forward whenever trying to enact change, but it’s amazing to look back at all that can be accomplished over a year.
We completed more than 10 applications, expanded our Top Derm app and saw our cloud gaming platform, Remote Play, mature to thousands of users a day. All that is a major collaborative effort across engineering, product, design and more.
Writing code as an engineer is an activity typically done alone, but software development is a team effort. Through collaborative architecture discussions, code reviews and continuous communication, we expand and build the expertise of our engineers.
We also cultivate our “bedside manner” to make ourselves the best partners for other departments that we can be, understanding their needs and intentions for a given project and tailoring solutions that meet both design’s needs and engineering realities.
Cleo is a Rockford-based provider of integration software, focusing on business-to-business enterprise data. Its upcoming projects include scaling the platform and implementing real-time analytics, data-driven actions and results. Product Development Senior Vice President Jorge Rodriguez says he is recruiting people who are enthusiastic, resourceful and ready to learn.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
It’s all about attitude. Of course, the foundational technical skills need to be there for the most part, but what we are really looking for is enthusiasm — people who are resourceful, know no boundaries and are collaborative in their approaches.
We look for people who are hungry to learn, humble in their approaches and smart.
We look for people who are hungry to learn, humble in their approaches and smart.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Our upcoming projects fall into four main areas. First is continuing to scale our platform for the growth we are experiencing, in particular focusing on what we call non-functional requirements.
Second is RADAR. This is an important capability our platform delivers, and the acronym stands for real-time analytics, data-driven actions and results. RADAR brings more enhanced service-level agreement rules notifications to our customers based on their trading partner relationships.
Third is accelerating the building of business-to-business integrations out of the box with the Cleo Integration Cloud. Fourth is improving our integration design time user experience with CIC.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
In a word, team. Software development is a team sport; and for a company our size, it must be a team sport across departments and geographies, from the United States to India.
We thrive on true collaboration, both proactively and reactively, and everyone’s work needs to be intentional. All ideas are welcomed so we can make 1 + 1 = 3.
Basis Technologies, an automation software provider for enterprise marketers, is currently pursuing a massive project that will determine its future data processing capabilities: migrating its company’s data infrastructure over to Snowflake. When it comes to securing a position on the company’s big data team, Software Engineering Vice President Anna Pleikis says that honesty is the best policy — both with others in the workplace and yourself.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
For anybody looking to land a spot on our big data team, I think it is vital to be honest, both with others in the workplace and with themselves. Operating with candor and honesty in these ways means being open-minded, collaborative, accountable and ready to learn from mistakes.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
One of the biggest projects in which we are currently involved is a migration of our company’s data infrastructure over to Snowflake. This is a huge initiative that will be taking place over the course of 2022 and 2023, and it will determine the future direction of our data processing capabilities.
There are exciting opportunities for enhancements within the existing data infrastructure at Basis Technologies. Our business is rapidly growing, and we are collecting and processing more and more data. To better facilitate this growth, we need to improve our systems so we can process and serve data faster, with greater control and protection.
We strive to support and enable each other to achieve common goals and set our company up for great success.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
I would choose caring. We care about our personal and professional growth. We care about delivering high-quality results on time, and we truly care about creating a sense of family for our team.
We strive to support and enable each other to achieve common goals and set our company up for great success.
In 2023, One North, a digital agency representing businesses, is expanding its marketing technology solutions and working with emerging technology such as AI and augmented reality. To support these goals, Technology Managing Director Ryan Horner is seeking curious people who inspire passion and collaboration in their teammates.
What’s one skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Curiosity. Curiosity drives exploration, inspires passion and fuels collaboration with team members across different functions. When we do our best work, it is because the collective team approached a client problem with an open mind and a healthy dose of curiosity.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Our job as a technology team is to help set our clients up for future success as they evolve. In 2023, we’ll be expanding our footprint with leading marketing technology solutions, such as Sitecore and Adobe, particularly as they embrace headless and composable architecture.
Our team will also be working on emerging technology such as AI, augmented reality, evolving cloud architectures and retooling DevOps.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Energized. The focus at One North is to help our clients and our employees fall in love with the future. For the technology team, that means creating a culture of possibilities. We want folks to be excited and energized by the solutions we are imagining and building.
Over the next year, HealthJoy, which provides an app for health and wellness strategies, is improving its data ingestion engine to better personalize members’ solutions. To achieve this, the healthtech company requires curious people to join their empowered technical team.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Curiosity. We want people who have a deep desire to build knowledge and understand the “why” so we can develop better solutions.
Take fixing a bug as an example. It’s typically easy to fix the surface-level symptom, but we want individuals who will go deeper, try to understand the root cause and fix the problem at the source.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We receive large amounts of data from different sources with various schemas and will continue adding more data sources with various schemas. In 2023, we are working on making large improvements to our data ingestion engine to handle all these different data feeds, which process and analyze these data sets in real time to steer our members to personalized, recommended solutions.
Providing even more personalized health recommendations to our members is an essential step toward our mission of making it easier to be healthy and well.
Giving others the room to own problems helps you find some of the most creative and innovative solutions, which results in more engaged, accountable engineers.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Empowerment. I’m a big believer that giving others the room to own problems helps you find some of the most creative and innovative solutions, which results in more engaged, accountable engineers.
It also leads to new challenges and opportunities for growth, especially as our leaders take on the role of coaches to support employees working through new learning curves.
Moving forward, the engineering team at Sittercity, a childcare provider platform, is prioritizing modernization and security in order to ensure a safe, robust marketplace for parents and caregivers. Across different levels of seniority, engineers at the kids and family software company need to be collaborative team players.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Our engineers are team players across all levels of seniority. Being a team player is more than just collaborating with your peers and supervisors; it means you can learn from everyone and recognize that good ideas can come from anywhere.
While technical skills are an important part of being a software engineer, how you interact with others and retain feedback is what we look for in a candidate.
While technical skills are an important part of being a software engineer, how you interact with others and retain feedback is what we look for in a candidate.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
The team I manage on the platform squad is gearing up for a big security push. We’re adding a security engineer to the team to help us spearhead this initiative while modernizing our platform.
We’ve also begun the first steps of implementing an observability tool to collect data and improve our processes. There’s a high level of trust that our users place on us, so we want to do everything we can to create a safe and robust marketplace for parents and caregivers.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Empathetic. I believe our mission and culture thrive on the empathy we have for our users and employees, on both a professional and personal level.
It requires a strong sense of emotional intelligence to be empathetic, but the payout is the psychological safety of our team. When people feel safe, supported and heard they’re more likely to succeed.
