Vee Weller — Engineering Manager 2 and Travel Enthusiast at Bench.

Published in

lifeatbench

7 min readNov 10, 2020

The Employee Spotlight series aims to highlight some of the amazing people who work here and get an insight into their experience at Bench.

In our latest spotlight, we sit down with Vee Weller, Engineering Manager 2 at Bench.

Having been at Bench for 8 months, Vee has hit the ground running from day 1 on the Engineering team.

What is your role at Bench currently?

I am an Engineering Manager for two teams currently, one that builds and maintains our app, the other develops and maintains our platform and infrastructure that our app and engineers work on.

As a leader, I help maintain and foster our amazing culture. I grow and develop my teams, and enable each individual to do their best work and deliver with quality.

But the best part is that this is the main focus of my job — Bench wants me to prioritize these things which I think is why it is such a great place to work for everyone.

Why did you decide to apply to Bench?

I was contacted by a recruiter and I wasn’t really considering it until I went into the Bench website and read about the company principles and saw how they truly embodied them — I mean, only those who truly care go through the effort of making a very robust mental health guide, and to top it off make it public for all to benefit from it.

I have heard many companies say that people are first but I had never seen or felt that way until I started having interactions with Bench.

Reading the blog and chatting with Blake, it was clear to me that “Default Open” actually meant open. It was such a breath of fresh air and the enthusiasm was contagious!

I could see that Bench’s values really aligned with my own and I couldn’t walk away from the opportunity to really make an impact alongside amazing colleagues.

How has your career progression been so far?

I first started working with our Internal team building and maintaining the tools our in-house bookkeepers use.

We are now working on both our existing product and on our very exciting new banking offering. Then I was offered the opportunity to work with our Platform team and learn all about our infrastructure and how we deliver an enjoyable experience to our developers and our customers.

How is every day different on the Bench Engineering team for you?

From the very first day, I have been given exciting and challenging opportunities and I am amazed at what I have accomplished thus far with the right support from my peers and leaders.

I am on both sides of the development processes, hence, I have the opportunity to work with different areas of the product.

I oversee or work on projects all the way from bugs and requests, to planning work to improve our uptime or our continuous integration pipelines, to working to obtain SOC2 compliance, or security and setting up PenTests.

This has given me the opportunity to learn so much and I know I am making a real impact in the company and for the customers that trust us with their books and their money.

What was the first lesson you learned being on the Engineering team, and how has that shaped you and your work since?

I have learned to be truly authentic and to take a stand for what is important to me.

My manager and I had some uncomfortable conversations about it, and he was honest but caring, and I understood that trying to say what I thought people wanted to hear was unfair to myself as well as to the company.

As a non-engineer woman in tech, my career hasn’t always been easy or straightforward and some residual fear was driving some of my decisions, but the environment at Bench has allowed me to let my passion guide me, and to take risks that I think I might not be ready for.

I accept failure because it helps me grow.

Successes and failures are important because of what we learn from them — which is part of our Foster Growth Principle!

What are you most excited about when it comes to future projects at Bench?

I am super excited about the banking product we have started building. It is very inspiring and astonishing to see what we have achieved in such a short amount of time.

It makes me feel so proud to see how Benchmates quickly respond to the new challenges and responsibilities, and how they truly embody the company principles day in and day out.

The second thing is in the past, but it gives me hope that in the future we will always find a way to do the right thing.

I am talking about the way the company quickly shifted during COVID to create a relief team to help companies (even those who were not our customers) to apply for loans and offer information on how to keep their businesses afloat even when there were no monetary gains to Bench.

It really made me feel so proud to work here and it still gives me goosebumps every time I think about it.

As an Engineering Manager 2, walk us through how you manage the team, how you approach leadership, work and providing feedback.

As a manager, I like to focus on giving clear direction to allow colleagues to do the best work on their own terms. This depends on their abilities to perform the task at hand, and will determine my leadership style.

What I always do regardless of their skills is I make myself available to jump in and offer guidance, expertise, or help where needed. I try my best to foster a relationship of trust where people can shine and grow personally and professionally. I go out of my way to have frequent check-ins, both for the work they are doing, general job satisfaction, and mental well-being.

In addition to the company principles, we have our own technology principles which allow us to dig deeper into what we do and how we do it. They do not oppose our company principles, they work hand in hand.

These three principles (Create Value, Foster Growth & Honour Time) have allowed me to have better conversations with my teams about the culture we want to build and foster here at Bench.

What do you feel separates Bench from other places you’ve worked at before?

The fact that people really care — about making a difference in the world, about customers, and about Benchmates!

People are passionate about what we are doing and the impact we have on our customers. It creates an environment of creativity and camaraderie where we come together to focus on the value we can create every day.

During your time at Bench, what has resonated with you the most?

That culture is the sum of every conversation.

It is a simple, yet powerful reminder that every single one of us has the responsibility of maintaining those conversations aligned with what we want our culture to be.

To know that even that conversation you are having with yourself in your own head is going to make a difference to the experience we all have here is something that prompts me to ask myself what I can do to make it better with every interaction.

What’s one fun fact about yourself that nobody on your team currently knows about?

I love traveling and everyone knows that, but I like immersing myself in the culture and going where the locals go. Many of my trips involve long distance walking and I recently completed a 350km pilgrimage from Portugal to Spain.

Anytime I am planning to visit a country, I will make a real effort to learn the language so I can really get immersed which allows me to partake in different experiences that are unavailable to regular tourists.

I speak English, Français and Español fluently and can get by with basic sentences in Deutsch, Italiano, Português, and Bahasa Indonesia.

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Learn more about Technology at Bench:

If you are interested in learning more about Bench Accounting or a career with our Engineering team, apply here: https://bench.co/careers/

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Want to know more about Bench? Check us out in Daily Hive, Georgia Straight, Inc.com, the blog of Perkins + Will and our Instagram.

Vee Weller — Engineering Manager 2 and Travel Enthusiast at Bench.

Written by bench accounting