Employee Highlight

Meet Susan: SVP of Engineering

How she’s steering the Engineering ship at Tray.io

Susan sits down with MK, our Head of Talent, to talk about her role as a leader, her vision for the team at Tray, and her friendship with change.

Watch the full interview below:

Read the transcript:

MK: I’d love for you to expand on “Engineering over Everything” because I know it’s not an adversarial thing, but at the same time, tell me what that means.

Susan: Yeah, I don’t exactly remember that, but I will tell you that, certainly as companies are growing up, getting traction, I do expect that a lot of the great ideas and a lot of the momentum is coming from engineers, individual engineers, and the engineering team.

I’m really keen on having engineers as close as possible to the problem space and letting the creativity start to surface.

MK: [Describe] your leadership style and what you ultimately think your role is as an engineering leader for the company.

Susan: I feel very strongly that I’ve been entrusted with a lot of responsibility.

For a company our size, Engineering is the heartbeat.

I feel like it is instrumental to the future success — the early success, certainly — but absolutely the future trajectory, and I take that responsibility pretty seriously.

And so we talked earlier about “How do we optimise our teams?” “How do we uplevel?” “How do we work on continually improving our ability to deliver high-quality software?”

That’s what I wake up every day to do.

MK: And as you think about expanding the amount of people that get to use the product and overall customer base, and continue to build product… That’s a lot of growth, and typically with growth comes change.

Susan: Change is absolutely a friend of mine, meaning it’s something that I count on, it’s something I think is important. I think it’s fun, I think it’s exciting. Realistically, we would be changing all the time if we were really thinking about pure business sense, we would be adjusting continually.

So for me, really being able to bring a clear sense to every single engineer about what role they specifically play in the overall success of the business, and that’s through the delivery of software.

But I think when we put together, collectively, a lot of great minds, some fabulous things can happen.