At Socure, I Get to Indulge My Passion for Problem Solving Every Day
By Dan Liang, VP of Engineering, Platform
I’m an engineer, and I suppose you could say that, by definition, I thrive on solving problems, learning, building, fixing, and improving the things I come into contact with.
I really started to understand my “mission” when I was in graduate school, working in a computer aid design center as a software engineer, alongside mechanical engineering professionals. We performed stress and strain simulations on key components in mission critical systems, like predicting the lifespan of an arm in an undersea cable-laying robot, for example.
The software people talked about data structure, algorithms and optimizations. The mechanical people talked about finite element analysis. The massive simulations were built and would run for days on supercomputers. It was fascinating stuff; we couldn’t stop talking about all of it, and each discovery, each discussion about each discovery — well, it became this incredible feedback loop that just stoked my curiosity even more.
Over the years I’ve built a lot of software, some of it mission-critical and some very complex, some with good teams and some with not-so-good teams. One striking similarity I noticed among the high performing teams, which may not be surprising, is the people and their passion for the work they’re doing. In those teams people with different specialties and from different backgrounds were fully committed and attacked the problems from different angles and perspectives. We discussed, challenged, and validated each other regarding the what, the why/why not, and the how of doing things. Together we made it work, made it work well, and made it work well at scale. And this was possible because of our collective passion for the work and our support for one another.
Building software in large companies is very different than when it’s done with a startup. I worked in a giant networking company for a long time and spent my last year there convincing leaders and organizations about a cloud networking idea, only to realize I was forever stuck in a consensus-seeking merry-go-round. So I left for a startup, and in just two years we launched our networking cloud. The company went public shortly thereafter.
Startups tend to be bold. Startups must run fast — as soon as we say “let’s do it,” we do it. Suffice it to say that the impact one can make in a startup is particularly outsized.
In another startup my team was set out to displace the data management system in a large airline. The system was developed by an IT conglomerate and cost many millions of dollars, yet it couldn’t keep up with the ever increasing variety, velocity, and volume of data. So the airline took the plunge and bet on us, even though we were a startup. We were a small team and it was an uphill battle, but we worked tirelessly and found ways to accomplish our goals. We celebrated after the system stayed up and processed a trillion events in six months, four times the volume compared to the old system we displaced. But we didn’t stop there. We celebrated even more when it reached another trillion events, but in half the time. The airline happily renewed our contract and we continued to deliver fantastic results.
We then replicated this success in several other and even bigger deployments. Seeing the system in action with thousands of Docker containers kicking and pumping, seeing the system self-adjust and self-heal, seeing our hard work pay off, knowing the impact we have made to our customers, to our company, and to ourselves — it was an engineers’ delight.
And that brings me to why I joined Socure.
Yes, Socure is a fast moving, hypergrowth startup, but it’s also solving really hard problems that affect the entire economy. Identifying ‘good’ customers while weeding out fraudulent ones is not easy, let alone doing it with 100% accuracy for the entire U.S. population. Socure has made amazing progress and one reason is because it is full of passionate people.
From our CEO, Johnny Ayers, to engineers and to everybody else in the company I have met, the energy is exhilarating. The belief and dedication to the mission, the trust and support for each other, and the knowledge sharing and learning from such a diverse group of people and industry experts — it has all the ingredients of a high performing team.
And I joined Socure to help bring the platform to the next level, a platform that powers growing and ever sophisticated analytics and a platform that scales to billions of identities and more. We are building great things together. I’m thrilled to be here.
