Finding the Right Fit

Nicolas Venegas
Curology Tech
Published in
4 min readOct 20, 2022
A window display of a rack of brightly colored down jackets

At Curology, an Engineering Manager interviewing you might not end up being your manager, and we might offer you a role on a different team.

In this blog post, I’ll cover why we think this works for candidates and the Engineering team.

This time last year, I was only interviewing engineers when I had a gap on my team. So both you and I could have a concrete conversation about the role I had open and the projects we have coming up, and also develop a rapport that hopefully led to both sides of the hiring process feeling great about the fit going into the offer stage.

Meeting the hiring manager you’ll work for as an initial hiring step is pretty standard, but it wasn’t optimal for several reasons:

  • After our conversation, we hired someone for the open position on my team; what are your options now?
  • The hiring market is hot and getting candidates through our process quickly is a priority. If a single Engineering Manager attempts to interview all candidates themselves, we end up with a single-threaded bottleneck in our hiring system. By using all Engineering Managers to interview people in our candidate pool, we have better load balancing characteristics for our interviewing throughput.
  • Maybe your skills or interests are best matched with a different team; we think performing the team match step toward the end of the process is more effective because it allows us to match you to a team after we’ve spent more time getting to know you.

One problem we’ve hit with this setup is that it can be challenging for candidates to recall what each Engineering team focuses on. But, of course, that’s pretty natural; you might be interviewing with multiple companies, and the initial Hiring Manager interview can be a relatively quick and slightly stressful affair (though Hiring Managers’ goal is to make you feel comfortable in the conversation!)

We think it’s essential to have a great picture of your options at Curology.

So that you always have a reference for what each Curology Engineering Team does, we’ve documented the business impact each team aims to deliver. Hopefully, you’ll find it helpful if we throw a team name such as R-LTV, MPO, or Growth at you during our conversations.

The R-LTV Team:

The Retention Driven Lifetime Value Team (“R-LTV” for short) focuses on building features that help new patients learn their Curology Skincare Routine and adapt it as their goals change. The team also aims to enable friction-free communication with our Skincare experts.

From the technology ownership side, we lean heavily into working with the Patient Facing Responsive Web App, building and enabling user journeys that excite people about Curology. R-LTV also owns communication channel technologies such as Email and SMS. Like all teams at Curology, we “build it and own it.” Our work extends to building system observability monitors, data analytics, and architecture work that supports our business goals.

The MPO Team:

Our Medical and Pharmacy Operations Team (MPO) is the lifeblood of the inner workings at Curology. Our work includes a platform for our medical providers to diagnose, prescribe, and answer skincare questions; an integration with a CRM tool for our customer success reps to respond to customer inquiries; an interface for our fulfillment techs to know what to put in each box and prep our daily shipments; and tools for finance/accounting, supply chain logistics, licensing (and more!) that our fellow Curology staff use daily to get their jobs done. Working with our Medical and Pharmacy Operations stakeholders, we help build out a first-in-class Provider and Customer Success experience while also ensuring our Fulfillment and Logistics teams have what they need to get a Curology box to your doorstep.

If you love internal tools, critical infrastructure, a fast feedback loop, or working closely with stakeholders, the MPO Team would be a great fit!

The Growth Team:

The Growth team focuses on getting prospective patients engaged with Curology from the first time they come across the brand to committing to sign up for the whole Curology experience. Whether it’s optimizing SEO on our site so that people can find us, working with our influencer-enabling stakeholders, or making sure we get people the proper product recommendations and offers, the Growth team is heavily involved in giving patients the confidence and tools to make an educated sign-up decision.

Growth team engineers iterate fast to get immediate feedback, so we can provide the best experience for our users. But also taking the time to pick the proper tooling and architectures in places so we have the best signal on how people experience Curology for the first time. If you’re motivated by working on full-stack “top of funnel” website and app experiences, the Curology Growth team is a match.

Thanks for Reading!

Every team is a great team to be an engineer on! However, you might have spent many years in a similar area and fancy a change, or you want to stay focused on a specific type of business goal. If you have a strong preference (say you wouldn’t accept a role in a particular team), that’s OK, let your Talent Acquisition contact know, and we will keep that preference in mind! We are also happy to provide more info about a team if you need it to make your mind up one way or the other.

That’s all we wanted to say! We hope this post helps you feel confident about your options throughout your journey with Curology Engineering.

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