Curai Software Engineer Spotlight: Mahnoor Shafi
Curaians agree that one of the best aspects of Curai is working alongside our teammates each day. To highlight what it’s like working here, we are writing a spotlight series to showcase our colleagues and share a bit more what the day-to-day is like and what we are building.
Mahnoor Shafi is a software engineer on our product engineering team 💁🏻 To kick it off, we’ll start with one of our favorite ice breaker questions 🧀
Favorite Cheese?
Goat brie! 🐐
Why did you decide to join Curai?
From the beginning, I wanted to join a small company where I would work on a complex problem, learn at a fast pace, and have a large impact. Having just spent a year working in an emergency room, I was drawn to Curai because they were working on issues I had seen first hand at the hospital and wanted to help solve. Curai stood out to me because of how comfortable I felt during the technical portions of the interview. I was both supported and left to struggle when needed, and I left all three interviews having learned something new. This spoke volumes to me because the people interviewing me were the ones I would work with and learn from and it made me want to come back. The fact that the product engineering team was small and full stack was also a huge selling point since it meant that I would be building features end to end of which I could take ownership.
Curai stood out to me because of how comfortable I felt during the technical portions of the interview
What were you afraid of before joining Curai?
Being slow. Since this was my first job, I was extremely worried about slowing everyone down and wanted to prove myself. However, I was advised very early on that it wasn’t about who could do what the fastest but about investing time in distributing knowledge so that everyone on the team could grow.
What have you learned at Curai?
I’m constantly learning how to make better technical decisions, write cleaner code, and give better code reviews, but beyond that I’ve learned when to ask for help versus when to struggle for the answer. I previously thought that learning something on my own would be more helpful to my long term growth but quickly learned this wasn’t sustainable. I’m lucky to have people on my team who are patient and always willing to teach.
I’ve learned when to ask for help versus when to struggle for the answer
What makes our engineering team culture unique?
We have people from many different backgrounds and skill levels but something we all share is wanting to continuously improve not only ourselves but the product as well. Product engineering at Curai wears many different hats and when something goes wrong, the question that always comes up is “where did we, as a team, go wrong, what can we learn, how can we fix it for next time?”. There’s no culture of blame which, in turn, increases our velocity. Everyone is also really good about asking questions to better understand the business requirements for what they’re working on. This results in people putting forth their best work because they understand how it will impact the company.
What are you working on right now?
The two projects I’m working on right now are improvements to our electronic health records and an after visit summary and survey for patients to review once they finish speaking with their health coach or doctor. Concurrently, I lead our bug triaging process.
OOO
Outside of the office, Mahnoor can be found:
🏃♀training for her first marathon alongside Curai teammates
🎵traveling around the country to catch Kaytranada and Soulection live
🥘eating crispy garlic fish and extra spicy drunken noodles at Sala Thai in Fremont
☕️perusing SF record stores and drinking all the coffee her local Philz has to offer
Favorite Curai moment?
My favorite period was building the functionality in our platform for patients to be escalated to licensed physicians and receive medical advice and prescriptions. It was a really exciting time to be here because not only were we making a huge change to the product in a fairly short amount of time but everyone really came together to make it a reality despite the constant hurdles.
What would you say to someone thinking about joining our team?
Things move fast and you have to be willing to juggle six things at once but the people here make it so worth it. You’ll do something out of your comfort zone every week (like run your first marathon).
Please stay tuned next month for our next Curaian spotlight! We’ll pass the baton to Mahnoor to highlight a teammate. If you’re passionate about healthcare access, up for bold challenges, and curious about working alongside really great people, don’t hesitate to say hi 👋
