How a gap year turned into a Founding Engineer opportunity
What I love about thirdweb is that everything is optimized for learning. I’d love to be a founder one day and there’s a lot of value to joining a start up that’s high growth and successful. — Adam Majmudar, Founding Engineer at thirdweb
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb
My name is Adam and I work on engineering across a variety of products: infrastructure, platforms, SDKs, APIs, occasionally front end at thirdweb.
What I love about thirdweb is that everything is optimized for learning. I’d love to be a founder one day and there’s a lot of value to joining a start up that’s high growth and successful. I’ve learned so much in the past two years and I feel more confident in my own abilities and knowledge of the space. One of the best ways to learn is by joining a start up. I’m learning more than I think I would in college.
What is one (or a few) values/team principles of the engineering team that stick out to you?
Ship fast and iterate is the biggest one and the one that’s manifested today.
This is a huge focus and we talk about this a lot. It’s a level thats felt across the team which is a rare thing, but that’s what you want out of an engineering team: to move fast and ship constantly.
How does thirdweb view engineering?
We’re definitely an engineering led company. Everything is driven from there to start with, the product and customers are engineers or engineering related. A lot of decisions get made from this perspective.
I’d also say that technical competence and engineering understanding is very important across the company.
Engineers are into this specifically. We want less processes, or at least for processes to be simplified. Engineers get pulled into almost every part of the business because our perspective is highly valued and needed in every area.
Tell us about thirdweb’s approach to engineering
There are a lot of different pieces to this. As far as building things, we’re heavily prioritizing the MVP and focusing hard on shipping it rather than doing a gigantic amount of planning and increasing scope.
We’re focused on the loop of iteration of gathering data and developing work as a result of knowing the data.
This also trickles into how we teach people about our products and what we offer — across marketing, BD and sales. The understanding of why these are valuable comes from engineering side given that our customers are developers.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience, how does this impact the work that we do on the engineering team?
The quality of your work is what will drive impact and be aligned to the company.
When it comes to levels of experience, people with more are focused on levelling up those with less to lift everyone up. This level of mentorship is hugely helpful.
The pace that we work at is not present across all teams and is hard to keep up with at times, but the flip side of this is that growth is huge and you will learn a lot — there’s a lot of opportunity.
What are some of the main obstacles our team faces and how do they overcome them?
It’s obviously a challenge being a new industry — Web3 is at a very early stage and there are loads of problems to solve. You’re on the forefront of things that haven’t been created before so you’re creating something new and innovating.
It’s amazing because we’re inventing and iterating in a new space. Often you’re walking new territory and running up against problems that very few people have run into. The interesting problem solving process is to figure out new solutions to new problems.
Thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our company vision?
Right now I’m getting data and analytics working on our web3 API and working on our infrastructure.
I’m also focusing on making our SDKs better, trying to get multi-language SDKs.
Author: Erika Khanna and A Maj
Contributors: Joher Khan
