Why did I join Machinify?
When I started to look for my next career challenge in September of 2021, I was talking to recruiters at Google, Meta, and other fortune 100 companies, and had landed a couple of compelling offers. I ultimately decided to join Machinify.
Why choose a startup I've never heard of before?
Machinify is looking to solve hard problems in an industry we all need.
Have you ever been to the doctor and been told you need a test but it will need to be scheduled a few weeks out because your insurance needs to approve it? I have, many times, not only for myself but for my family as well. It's one of the most frustrating things in life, watching a loved one needing tests and potentially treatment but having to wait for permission from an unknowable entity.
Machinify is working to close that gap. Do you need X for your health? Let's use Machinify to provide the statistical reasons that show you need this treatment. And get an approval in seconds, not weeks. Yes, this is potentially life saving for people (myself included - ask me sometime).
There are a lot of crazy smart people to learn from.
To me, what really set this place apart was the diversity of people whom I was speaking with, when interviewing. There were no buzz words, there were no tricks or silly puzzles. I was talking to people with a clear passion, and who are trying to solve really hard problems. I spent several sessions talking about how I would approach specific real problems. It was refreshing!
Technical challenges from all over
The breadth of the Machinify stack is extensive, its infrastructure, its application stack, its data science tool chain, and its orchestration platform are all built on top of open source components.
- How can we handle versioning and deployments of all of these different services quickly, cleanly, and with a small team?
- How do we ensure a 99.999% uptime for all of these systems?
- How do we confirm that machine learning models are producing accurate results with automation before we allow its deployment?
- How do we automatically scale our primary and subsystems independently to support customer needs?
- What tools do we need to create that will empower other teams to focus on their core competency?
- What metrics do we use to measure our success?
Those are the questions that we ask ourselves twice a week, and take action to make said answers a reality.
Opportunity for Impact on the Business
I am able to bring my genuine self to work every morning. I am a firm believer of taking my assignments seriously, but not myself. This comes in two ways:
- If I see something that can be improved, I'd bring it up and be assigned to own the solution.
- I show up to SEVs wearing a black rhinestone cowboy hat with leds flashing like an operations firefighter.
Being given the autonomy to be one's self while also being allowed to drive organizational changes speaks volumes of the trust that leadership extends to people who want to make a difference. It also provides a place of psychological safety, where you can do your best work of your life without worrying about pretending to be someone you aren't.
The result of this trust and environment:
In the first six months my team brought radical changes to how we deliver software to our operating environment, how we manage incidents, how we operational existing processes, and much more. In a company of less than one hundred, the core value of "we loathe suck" is readily apparent. Our roadmap for the next six months is even more ambitious than the last six.