Quantum Metric, Inc. Career Growth & Development

What makes your role now a dream job? What do you get to do that you didn’t at other companies? 

The profound trust placed in me to lead the teams responsible for our company’s most critical systems is my primary motivation. These systems are foundational to our operations and strategic success, and the responsibility to ensure their reliability and evolution is invigorating. My role uniquely positions me at the crucial intersection of strategy and execution. I focus on translating high-level business objectives into clear, actionable priorities for my teams, empowering them to architect and deliver the innovative solutions that are essential for driving the company’s progress and maintaining our competitive edge.

What do you think helped you land the job? Were you able to bring any special expertise or project experience that Quantum Metric found valuable?

My journey to Quantum Metric has been significantly shaped by the strong professional network I’ve cultivated over the years. It was this foundation of key relationships, built on a consistent track record of high performance and delivering impactful results, that opened the door to this opportunity. More importantly, it’s this history of proven capability and reliability that has earned me the trust to manage some of Quantum Metric’s most critical systems — a responsibility I take very seriously.

What do you think helps engineers move up quickly or be the top pick for a competitive employer? What should engineers seek out if they hope to move up or be hired by their “dream” company?

I prioritize several key attributes in individuals: a dedication to continuous learning and improvement, the capacity for autonomous work, and a strong sense of ownership over the systems they build. 

A willingness to learn means an engineer isn’t afraid to step out of their comfort zone. They see challenges as opportunities to grow. This leads to more versatile and effective engineers who can adapt to new project requirements and contribute to a culture of continuous improvement within the team.

Autonomous engineers are highly valuable because they free up senior engineers and managers from excessive hand-holding. They can be trusted to take a task from start to finish, making them efficient and reliable team members. This doesn’t mean they work in a silo, but rather that they can drive their work forward independently.

Engineers with an ownership attitude don’t just see themselves as “coders” who complete tickets — they see themselves as stewards of the system. They feel a sense of pride in its success and a responsibility for its failures. This leads to higher-quality, more reliable software and a more proactive and engaged engineering team.

What’s it like to work on the engineering team at your company?

Engineering at Quantum Metric is a breath of fresh air. Instead of churning feature after feature out without our input and against impossible deadlines, engineering and our cross-functional partners at the company work together toward a common goal: improving how our customers use their data to understand their customers and build customer-defined digital products faster.

Stability, performance and extensibility aren’t afterthoughts; they’re first-class citizens that we work with our product and business partners to uphold. When we’re looking to tackle business problems, we’re not brought in at the eleventh hour. We’re on customer calls and work closely with our colleagues and counterparts to craft the right technical solutions.

These solutions aren’t straightforward. They’re genuinely interesting technical problems. I’ve had both interview candidates and customer engineers tell us that what we want to do is impossible within the iOS and Android ecosystems, but we indeed do achieve the impossible on a daily basis.

In short, engineering at Quantum Metric isn’t treated as a cost center like it is in basically every other company. We are critical partners in our collective success.

How does your team support learning, upskilling or technical growth for engineers?

The most important way our team supports learning for engineers is through diversity. I can’t think of two individuals on our team who followed the same, cookie-cutter path many picture as the “ideal” in this industry, like going to a top-tier computer science program or working at a “big” tech company. 

Our team’s diversity of experiences fosters an environment where we can all learn from each other. When we work on tough problems — and that happens all the time here — we bounce ideas off of each other and the solution we come up with more often than not is quite different from each team member’s original proposal.

Having individuals who worked on mission-critical systems and quality engineering, individuals who worked at small scrappy startups and individuals who worked at big tech companies lets us all teach each other what we learned in our prior lives and come up with novel solutions that balance the multitude of constraints we all have to as engineers.

In our team discussions, I always hear, “I never would have thought about that” — but now all of us will think about that, and we all have grown and learnt from our collective experiences and perspectives.

What kinds of projects or challenges help engineers build new skills on your team?

Usually when we think of engineers building new skills, we think about learning a new language, framework or tool. The fact of the matter is that professional growth for an engineer should be multi-faceted and well-rounded. That’s what differentiates us and gives us a competitive advantage throughout our careers. Learning a new language, framework or tool? That’s just table stakes.

At Quantum Metric, engineers wear many different hats and no day is the same. We solve deeply interesting engineering problems that require reverse engineering how operating systems and frameworks work. We support a multitude of app architectures across every operating system version and device our customers support. We manage complex cross-functional projects that move the needle for the company. We work closely with account teams and customers to help them build cultures maniacally focused on winning the hearts of their customers.

Roles where you can start your day disassembling compiled software to figure out an esoteric bug and end your day working with senior leaders at Fortune 100 companies are few and far between, but we’re lucky enough to have those opportunities to take us to the next level.