Imprint celebrates International Women’s Day 2023!

The Imprint engineering team is proud to celebrate International Women’s Day by highlighting and celebrating the contributions of our women engineers. As a team, we recognize that diversity and inclusion are essential to fostering creativity and innovation, and we are committed to creating a welcoming and supportive culture for all team members.

Our women engineers have made significant contributions to the success of our team. They bring unique perspectives and skillsets to the table, and their diverse backgrounds and experiences help us to better understand and serve our customers.

Join us on a tour today to gain insights from some of our exceptional female engineers as well as a deeper understanding of the culture we are building here at Imprint.

Esmeralda, Software Engineer, Core Experience

Esmeralda came to Imprint via the Kleiner-Perkins Fellows Program as a recent graduate of Brown University. She hit the ground running by building Imprint’s first internal underwriting engine and has since moved on to own even larger projects. Most recently, she enhanced the rewards feature set by designing and implementing the offer domain within Imprint’s rewards platform.

What has been your biggest learning while making the transition from university to Imprint?

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned at Imprint was how to ‘ruthlessly prioritize’ assignments or requests that come my way. At school, you just do whatever assignment a professor would give. But here, your time is a valuable resource and you learn quickly how to question things and work with stakeholders to make sure you are doing the most valuable work at any given time.

You were one of the earliest engineers at Imprint. How do you feel the engineering culture has grown since joining?

One cultural aspect that has been consistent since the beginning is that engineers are pretty autonomous — meaning that engineers would work as end-to-end feature owners. The engineering team looks to challenge its engineers while also giving them the resources and support to succeed. This environment, therefore, allows engineers to grow fast and own a lot.

The team is also really committed to improvement and because of that, a lot has changed. As we hire more engineers, new members always bring new ideas to the table, and we always make it a priority to hear these ideas and figure out manageable next steps to constantly improve our systems and processes.

What’s your favorite slack emoji in the Imprint workspace?

:party_parrot:

Helen, Senior Software Engineer, Core Experience

Helen has made major contributions across two teams at Imprint. She joined as a member of the full-stack team and led the initial build of our internal CRM before transitioning to the backend team where she has continued to make a huge impact. Most notably, she took the initiative to re-design and refactor the entire rewards infrastructure to better abstract the growing number of features Imprint offers. She also pushed both the engineering and product team to adopt a new dynamic value store for content strings, enabling Imprint to support localization.

How do you feel you’ve grown as an engineer in transitioning from the full-stack team to a backend role?

I started my career as a full stack engineer working on internal tooling, and applied my previous experience when building our customer support tooling at Imprint. I was excited when I had the opportunity to transition to a backend role to work on different tech, learn from more senior engineers, and build for a different customer base. In the first few months, I was mainly digesting the new code base and trying to understand the architecture by building new features. Although I got frustrated at times, I reminded myself to just keep asking questions and learn from mistakes. Gradually, I also learned to be more thoughtful about logs and monitors to facilitate debugging, as well as the importance of building operations that are resilient to human errors and intentional trade-offs. I still have lots to learn and grow and am fortunate to have my teammates along for the ride!

You’ve played a large role in reshaping the rewards infrastructure at Imprint. What has been your biggest takeaway from that work?

In the early days of our rewards infrastructure, we implemented a basic rewards program where you earned and used rewards as you transact. As we built more features, we continued to add APIs to the rewards service. Cue to the day we needed to integrate a third-party system to also manage the earning and usage of rewards: we realized integration would be difficult because we lacked sufficient abstractions. After we analyzed our reward service as a whole, we recognized there were two major features — accruing and redeeming rewards — and each system that manages rewards has its own implementation of these features. Once we had a framework for organizing our rewards service features, it was easier to integrate a new third-party reward provider and to build upon existing abstractions when building new features.

What’s your favorite slack emoji in the Imprint workspace?

:llama-yay-gif:

Jue Zou, Software Engineer, Data Platform

Jue is a founding member of the Data Platform team at Imprint. She specialized in data infrastructure and warehouse development. Her work requires active cross-functional communications and in-depth technical skills to power the company’s business analytics and financial platform. FUN FACT: Jue first learned coding in Pascal, leading to a vibrant software engineering career.

Given Imprint has such a distributed workforce, how do you like the company’s remote work culture? How has it impacted your day-to-day and work-life balance?

At Imprint, we have coworkers from the East Coast to the West Coast. Remote work has saved me time in my commute and allowed me to focus more on the job itself while spending time with family and friends. Though sometimes I do miss the boba runs at the office.

What role does data (platform) play in the Fintech space? What is particular about Imprint as far as co-branded credit cards go?

In the Fintech world, data plays an active role. Our B2B2C business model requires the data platform team to securely and reliably share insights with our business partners, as well as to use real-time data to analyze consumer behaviors and drive decision-making.

How does Imprint support women in the workplace?

It’s definitely unlike companies that take affirmative action in hiring but distance female employees from getting involved with important projects or strategy-making processes. At Imprint, we not only have a community of women working in different functions supporting each other, but also women are actually leading large engineering projects, business partnerships, and making a real impact here.

What’s your favorite slack emoji in the Imprint workspace?

:wow-amaze:

Wanting Shao, Senior Software Engineer, IOS platform

As a key member of our Mobile iOS team, Wanting’s contributions are critical to the group’s success. Her expertise in iOS technical issues is extensive and highly valued. Wanting has led multiple projects at Imprint and consistently delivered exceptional features that exceed our customers’ expectations. Working closely with product managers and designers, Wanting ensures that the UI/UX experience we provide is optimal for our customers. Overall, Wanting’s impact on our Mobile iOS team is essential to our continued growth and success.

What steps have you taken to maintain a high standard for our iOS mobile app, considering Imprint’s dedication to our customers who use our mobile apps?

To maintain a high standard for our iOS mobile app, a well-designed architecture is essential. By investing time in designing a good architecture upfront, significant time and cost savings can be realized during future development. A good architecture provides a clear structure that separates concerns and promotes modular design, which makes the codebase easier to understand, modify, and maintain. As a result, it promotes code quality and reduces the likelihood of technical debt, facilitating testability and ensuring that the app functions as intended. Codebase can become difficult to maintain over time as it evolves. Proactive refactoring can prevent technical debt from accumulating and improve the codebase’s structure, design, and readability. This makes future maintenance and modifications easier. Ultimately, the primary goal is to ensure customer satisfaction by delivering a high-quality app that meets their needs and expectations.

In what ways does Imprint provide support for women in the workplace?

Imprint is committed to supporting women in the workplace by providing a range of initiatives and policies that promote inclusivity and career development. This includes inclusive recruitment practices, such as actively seeking out and encouraging women to apply for positions within the company. Imprint also provides career development opportunities, such as mentorship and leadership programs, to help women advance in their careers. Additionally, Imprint offers flexible working arrangements and ensures that women receive equal pay and benefits for equal work. Overall, Imprint strives to create an empowering and supportive work environment for women.

What’s your favorite slack emoji in the Imprint workspace?

:party_blob:

Sam Fadrigalan, Senior software engineer, Core Experience

Sam came to Imprint with extensive big-tech experience and hit the ground running with a wealth of technical and cultural standards for the team to adopt. Aside from continually pushing for improved processes, she has also driven some of Imprint’s most critical projects: the largest being Imprint’s adoption of a new issuer-processor enabling multi-processor & multi-network, increasing both business value as well as reliability. She also drove one of Imprint’s largest technical initiatives in refactoring the onboarding flow to a more reliable, asynchronous process.

What do you think is the most important thing to focus on when leading a large project?

I learned 2 major things that go hand-in-hand while working with the team at Imprint: don’t be crushed by the unknowns and ensure everyone crushing the unknowns are on the same page. This is not a backed heuristic, but constantly asking ourselves the question “Are we at a 90% known state?” help us set our direction quickly. If we find that we are not close to that 90% in any facet of the project, finding ways to get closer to that number becomes a top priority. If everyone has a clear understanding of the top things that need to be achieved for a project, having productive discussions to get to the next steps becomes easy.

— plug for Tim Nguyen who helped me learn the things above!

You have experience at a few other tech companies. What makes Imprint different?

This is a very cliche answer but true — for me it’s the people. The people at Imprint set an incredibly fast-paced environment while not cutting corners technically and culturally. I am constantly challenged to make better engineering design decisions, to expand outside of my technical role and give more product and design input, to step outside of my comfort zone, and many more. The little over a year I have spent at Imprint feels like many more years I could have spent at other companies to learn just as much. Most of all, I just genuinely enjoy working and spending time with my colleagues. Whether it be in pushing features off to the finish line or trying out yet another lunch option in the endless list of NYC restaurants together.

What’s your favorite slack emoji in the Imprint workspace?

:pika_groove:

We are incredibly proud of the contributions and leadership of our women engineers at Imprint. We firmly believe that diversity is a critical component of our success, and we are committed to continuing to build a culture that is welcoming, supportive, and empowering for all team members. Join us today and be part of the movement to build a more inclusive and diverse engineering culture! Visit imprint.co/careers or reach out to talent@imprint.co for more details.