Faces of Uncountable
Meet Full Stack Engineer Brendan Le
Brendan shares his day-to-day experiences
We’re happy to present a series of interviews with members of the Uncountable team. The purpose of these is to shed light on the people behind our platform, including their professional backgrounds, what led them to join our team, and what they work on behind the scenes.
Today’s interview is with Brendan Le, Full Stack Software Engineer at Uncountable.
Employee Profile: Brendan Le — Full Stack Software Engineer
UNC: What about Uncountable enticed you to join?
Brendan: I thought the general concept of Uncountable was very interesting, especially the ML side. The way we use ML to generate suggestions for new experiments to run for scientists — that was something I’d never heard of before. Also, Bayesian optimization — which is the backbone of this technology — was something I hadn’t heard of before. I looked into that when I was applying and found it really interesting.
UNC: What projects are you leading at Uncountable?
Brendan: I’m responsible for a couple of big projects on the platform, especially for just having been here for one year. One of those is the calculations system on the platform. This is the system that is responsible for deriving data from other data. It runs over all of the other data on the platform, so it can be very computationally intensive. A lot of the work I’ve done is to speed that up and make sure it doesn’t crash the system, and also building stuff on top of this very complex system.
I’m also involved in a lot of the ML systems. We have a pretty complicated ML system that suggests experiments to scientists. A lot of the feature asks that come in regarding that get assigned to me, and I’m gradually becoming more familiar with that part of the platform as I build new features on top of that part of the codebase.
UNC: What kinds of problems are you solving at Uncountable?
Brendan: Most of the feature development and general development on the platform is driven by customers. The platform we try to build is one that best serves the customers needs. A lot of times when we build new features we try to think of how the customers will interact with it and optimize for that.
A lot of our customers are scientists and they work with data. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to store their data in a structured data format and to visualize and help them understand their data better.
UNC: What’s the most rewarding part of the job for you?
Brendan: When I first joined I was surprised with how closely we interacted with the customers. I’m not sure that’s a very common thing amongst other companies. We’ll get on calls with them very frequently, we’ll get on screen-shares if they’re experiencing a bug we can’t reproduce. We try to help one-to-one. We have a pretty close relationship with our customers.
Whenever I implement a new, big feature, I’ll get on a demo screen-share with our customers and it’s pretty rewarding to see how they’re responding to the feature and the feedback they provide for it.
UNC: How have you been able to mentor others at Uncountable? Do you receive mentorship?
Brendan: I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to mentor our intern, Tim. I’ve just been here for one year, but I’m already getting leadership opportunities. I do a lot of code review on his work, and also get on calls, walk him through things, get him up to speed.
I also get great support from my manager, Will. Even having been here a year, I still get stuck a lot. My main method of getting unblocked on stuff is getting help from my manager, and having that outlet is really helpful.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
