1. Can you tell us about your background and what led you to engineering?
I was between careers at the exact moment that coding boot camps were beginning to pop up. I had left academia, having decided that continuing to a PhD wasn't for me, and learning to code was appealing, having grown up in a family surrounded by programmers and tech workers. The school I attended was founded by an engineer deeply immersed in Ruby and the Rails ecosystem, with an instructor who was a bit of a SQL fanatic, and as a result it was a great introduction to languages that I'm still working with and a developer community that I can't say enough good things about.
2. Can you describe your job here at Cutover? What does a typical day look like for you?
I'm an Engineering Team Lead with the Core Back End squad. As a squad, we tend to work on performance enhancements, code that touches the database, and necessary things for stability like version upgrades and changes to the business logic of the application (what we call the "back end"). Some days I'm heads down on a new piece of functionality or a proof of concept, some days I'm pairing with a team member on a hard-to-reproduce bug, some days I'm collaborating with members of another team to find the best solution to an issue that touches several different areas of Cutover. Every day is a little different, which keeps things interesting.
3. What attracted you to join Cutover and what’s the most exciting thing you’re working on at the moment?
I'd worked at several companies prior to Cutover - mostly in health tech - during the early phases of the startup life cycle. Getting a company up off the ground is obviously a challenge, but I'd argue that an even more exciting time is where Cutover is currently: when a lot of those initial questions about what you're making and who it's for have mostly been answered, and you get to start shaping it into the best version of itself for as many people as possible. To that end, my team and I have been doing a lot of work with performance testing and benchmarking for the application, most recently as part of the Cutover Respond launch, and it was great to see how the tools we've built over the last year or so enabled everyone to get a sense of how new features will perform in the wild.
4. What is your approach to leadership in your role?
Mostly I see myself as a teammate and partner in enabling the rest of the squad’s work, whatever that entails. Maybe I'm pairing with someone to keep forward momentum going on something intricate or complicated. Maybe there's been an uptick in high-priority bugs, so I take a few for myself to allow folks to stay on task. It might mean that I'm in a few more meetings or spending more time in JIRA so that our priorities are clear, open questions and follow-up actions are all taken care of, and getting started on new tasks is relatively frictionless. It does sometimes mean more context switching for me, but as long as everyone is getting the support they need then it's an easy tradeoff.
5. As a woman in tech, what advice would you give to others who are just starting their careers in engineering?
Say yes to things, don't let imposter syndrome drive you. Volunteer for that stretch assignment or the migration project using the new framework you don't know, or to cross-train with the team whose work is a bit of a black box. I think there's a lot of well-intentioned advice out there about finding a niche early, but there are so many different technologies, languages, tools, and ways of working out there that it's hard to know what really clicks unless you seek opportunities to get exposure to as many different things as you can.
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