Welcome to the ActionIQ Tech Blog….

So let’s start with an introduction — who am I and what is ActionIQ?

I’m Steve McColl, VP of Engineering at ActionIQ and I lead our engineering teams. Outside of my family and other interests (music and motorcycles), I love:

• Leading engineers to build great products
• Building and delivering Enterprise Software (more on that in a moment)
• New York City

… and therefore I feel that ActionIQ is my second home.

Quick aside on Enterprise Software and my love for it - the B2B software game has changed a lot in the last few years. Complexities and friction that used to exist with boxed-software / datacenter installs are barriers that are being broken down as more and more companies become comfortable with how their software vendors build and secure cloud-hosted software/services. That results in the opportunity to build distributed systems with deeper functional and technical value, faster feedback loops (we can react to demand by shipping quickly), a chance to work closer with users we know use our platform (and how they use it), improve consistency by using a standardized infrastructure offering etc.

This is one of the inflection points that allows ActionIQ to position ourselves so favorably to our clients and operate with such impact… and merits another article which we’ll publish in the future. For now, back to our scheduled program.

ActionIQ is an enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP) that is 4 years old and headquartered in NYC. Customer data is a hard currency for B2C companies and yet unlocking the value is something that is typically challenging for all companies (you can see who some of our clients are here). Our goals are to enable our clients’ ability to unlock that customer data, gain deeper insight, take action and for us to offer incremental new value through data analysis and machine learning. Lofty goals indeed and to do this we have built an exceptional team across all that we do — sales, marketing, client engagement, technology and operations.

So, to dive a little deeper, Technology is a group at ActionIQ that includes Data Science, Design, Product and Engineering. Engineering itself is split into three teams:

1. Full Stack — the team that builds the product that our clients use to gain insight and take action on their Customer Data
2. Backend — the team that builds our data platform (a proprietary in-memory query and persistence layer) which stores and provides quick access to Customer Data
3. Infrastructure — the team that ensures we can make our platform and product available to our clients as a SaaS solution and also enables our engineers to build, deploy and support their services.

The aim of this blog is to give some insight into all of these teams (design to infra), what we do, how we have solved some interesting problems and in-general contribute to the broader Tech ecosystem in NYC and beyond. We’ll also use it as a platform to showcase some of the solutions we open-source, advertise events and meet-ups we are hosting.

…and obviously we’ll also use it to highlight where we are hiring because, like every other tech company in NYC, we are always looking for great talent to join our team. If you are interested in who we are, what we do, working in a NYC startup in enterprise software and want to see our open roles then do look here.

Steve leads Engineering at ActionIQ and loves building excellent enterprise software products and excellent engineering teams. He’s been doing this a while across a number of different industries and has built software from the “good old days” of building websites in perl and writing business logic in stored procedures to large distributed data-driven systems, mobile and desktop apps and reporting tools.
Outside of the office, he spends most of his time with his wife, 3 daughters and two cats in Brooklyn and a little time riding motorcycles or making music.