#LifeAtAIQ for a Remote AIQ Engineer, Part II
Our very own Naveen and John take the keyboard for this two part series. This is John’s take on “A Day in the Life of a Remote AIQ Engineer” and Naveen’s take can be found here.
My name is John Favorite. I have always loved all things technology for as long as I can remember. Understanding how things work and why has always been important to me.
After graduating from High School, I joined the military to pursue an Advanced Electronics path. While serving, I helped whenever possible with personal computers. This allowed me the opportunity to eventually pivot my experience to contracting work into Systems Administration, Systems Engineering, and Systems Architecture, with Cybersecurity sprinkled in for good measure. Contracting was very rewarding, but it was never innovating as fast as I liked. The desire to “move fast and break stuff” led me to the start-up world. I have learned a ton about technology, engineering in general, and just how important people and the organizational values are when it comes to your career.
I worked with Steve McColl, our VP of Engineering at a previous start-up and he invited me to interview here at ActionIQ. (I still had to pass the interview process!) The scale at which AIQ operates was very exciting, and I was looking to put my prior experience to the test. A NYC-based start-up was also a huge appeal since I love all things NY.
How does AIQ invite you into the culture as a remote employee?
ActionIQ goes to great lengths to ensure the experience is welcoming and inclusive for remote employees. We do everything from shipping snacks during special events like Hackathons, swag, work anniversary gifts or Growth Mindset awards, directly to employees. If there is a surprise in the office, remote employees are included and sometimes fun stuff just shows up!
The meeting experience is also set to ensure all employees can contribute by having great A/V equipment in the office and an office equipment stipend for remote employees to spiffy up their home workspace. I bought an awesome USB-C hub that lets me plug all kinds of peripherals into my laptop, creating a ridiculously nice setup from home.
All remote employees are asked to come in once a quarter, but it’s completely flexible. The idea here is that connecting with your coworkers in person is a unique experience that is hard to replicate over Zoom. Luckily, my coworkers are wonderful, and coming to the office is really fun. ActionIQ makes it frictionless to get reimbursed for any approved expenses too, which is so nice. We have a great space, snacks, catered lunches, All Hands meetings, and everyone is happy to see us when we visit the office. I enjoy visiting the office so much, I usually make it up every six weeks, either through my own desire to be in the office or encouragement from coworkers.
What are you looking forward to over the next 6 months as an AIQ engineer?
This is a tough one-there are lots of things I am looking forward to in the next six months! From a company strategy standpoint, I’m excited about InfiniteCompute and HybridCompute. It is awesome that our platform can scale into other data stores and further enrich customers’ experience with our platform. From a team perspective, the work we are planning to improve our Infrastructure as Code is beyond exciting. We are going to pay down technical debt, add a ton of quality gates to improve overall code quality, and do our part to keep the flywheel in motion by increasing the entire company’s velocity to ship all our great product features we have in the works. As a DevOps Engineer, it checks all the boxes of my career goals.
ActionIQ brings order to Customer Experience (CX) chaos. Our CX Hub empowers everyone to be a CX champion by giving business teams the freedom to explore and take action on customer data, while helping technical teams regain control of where data lives and how it is used. We are backed by top-tier VCs Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, March Capital, and First Mark Capital. Enterprise brands such as Autodesk, Acrisure, Washington Post, Neiman Marcus, Hertz, and many more use our CX Hub to drive growth through extraordinary customer experiences.
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