3 Reasons to Consider Veeva

By: Andrew Smith, Sr. Manager, Engineering

The Industry Shift

In a few short weeks the tech industry job market has undergone a tectonic shift. A hiring manager after top talent previously had to move swiftly to avoid a “bidding war” (not unlike the Toronto housing market).

Nowadays, whether your company has faced layoffs due to the unfortunate crisis of COVID-19 or whether you are simply looking for a change, positions are fewer and candidates more numerous.

Regardless of your circumstances, there are a handful of exciting companies still hiring.

Spotlight on Life Sciences

In connecting with candidates, I enjoy sharing the vision and impact that Veeva Systems is having on an industry that is now in the spotlight. It’s an industry that has always been instrumental in extending and improving our quality of life.

The global Life Sciences industry is innovative, massive in size and capital investment, and constantly evolving. However, unless you are working in this industry, you may know little about it. You may know little about its technology landscape.

Despite being one of the fastest-growing public companies in the world, according to the Fortune 100, many candidates haven’t heard much about Veeva Systems. They naturally tend to hear a lot more about consumer applications that they use every day.

If you are a driven technology professional looking for your next career challenge, and if you want to tackle a new domain that also happens to be of great relevance to our rapidly changing world, taking a closer look at Life Sciences could be a good choice.

Why Veeva?

So why should you consider Veeva Systems as a way to accelerate your career while making a meaningful impact on the Life Sciences industry?

I will walk you through the story I share with candidates which highlights my top 3 reasons to consider Veeva for your next career move.

Learning Experience — Software Platforms

If you’re looking to build a career in Software, there are some experiences that could help round you out as a professional.

The term “software platform” is used loosely in industry, yet systems that provide the foundation that allows powerful applications to be rapidly built upon them tend to be rare. Working with one of these platforms is a great learning experience for any software engineer or technology professional to consider.

This is reason #1, and the story begins with our founder and CEO, Peter Gassner.

Peter — an Oregon State University graduate in Computer Science — began his career as a developer at IBM working on DB2. It was a few years later when he joined PeopleSoft as a developer that his journey with software platforms would begin.

During his eight years at PeopleSoft, Peter ascended from developer to Chief Architect, VP, and GM of PeopleTools. In the history of software platforms you could say PeopleSoft played an important role, and it was PeopleTools that provided the capabilities and “building blocks” such as a scripting language, metadata framework, security structure, and batch-processing.

With an already accomplished career in software platforms, Peter was then recruited by a small private company at the time called Salesforce.com which had a bold vision to provide CRM software from a cloud-based infrastructure. As the SVP of Technology, his objective was to build out Salesforce’s platform, Force.com, and take it to the enterprise.

The success of Salesforce.com and its platform speaks for itself. Peter later moved on and in 2007 — after a year and a half of consulting for cloud companies — he teamed up with healthcare technology veteran Matt Wallach to found Veeva Systems. Their first act was to build CRM software on the Salesforce.com platform for the Life Sciences industry.

Beyond Salesforce, there were very few companies running enterprise software in the cloud at the time, and Veeva’s vision of building industry-specific cloud software for Life Sciences was met with some skepticism.

While securing early adopters wasn’t easy — as noted by Ron Miller of TechCrunch — Peter’s familiarity with the Salesforce.com platform and Matt Wallach’s expertise in healthcare technology proved successful as Veeva’s CRM software achieved a strong market position.

With a successful first act, Veeva then began building its own content management platform, Vault. As its second act, Vault has proved instrumental in the continued growth of Veeva today. As a true software platform, it has allowed Veeva to rapidly build out cloud-based applications for the variety of specific needs of the Life Sciences industry. Our developer portal provides detailed documentation on capabilities such as a Java SDK, query language, metadata framework, public REST API, and more.

While I can only speak to experience on Vault, it is the learning opportunity of working on an industry-leading software platform that is my first reason why you should consider a career with Veeva Systems. There are great people to work with who have a deep understanding of software platforms that you will get the chance to collaborate with and learn from. There are unique challenges that such a platform presents in a cloud-based, multi-tenant environment. It’s an experience that any well-rounded technology professional should consider.

Impact on Life Sciences

Let’s look at reason #2: impact.

It helps to first understand the technology landscape of the Life Sciences industry.

Imagine the product development life cycle of a new cancer treatment or a vaccine for the virus causing COVID-19. It’s a bit more involved than a software project, costing in excess of $2.5 billion USD on average as of 2013 — according to Joseph A. Dimasi, Henry G.Grabowski, and Ronald W.Hansen, of The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) — and up to 10 years to complete (as you may have heard, COVID-19 vaccines are being fast-tracked at record time).

From research and development related areas such as clinical trials, regulatory affairs, product quality, and drug safety, to medical affairs, CRM, and other commercial activities, there’s a coordinated, global effort involved. All of this is to be done in compliance with regional regulatory bodies like Health Canada or the FDA.

You may think that, for such an innovative industry of great relevance to the quality of human life, and with the amount of investment involved, the software would have been applied across the life cycle to increase velocity.

The reality of the software landscape has been quite fragmented, with vendors specializing in niches and Life Science companies having to deal with multiple vendors, many of them providing legacy on-premise solutions. Much of this has negated the overall positive impact that any one vendor could have. Thus, before Veeva had arrived on this landscape, the promise of increased velocity through applied technology had unfortunately not come to fruition.

These challenges presented a great opportunity for Veeva Systems to unify the spectrum of applications in the cloud with a degree of seamlessness, usability, and integration previously not possible.

The following points help illustrate the growth and impact on Life Sciences:

• 81% of new drugs approved across the globe were launched with Veeva CRM.
• 40% cut in Trial Master File reconciliation time with Vault eTMF (i.e. faster running clinical trials).
• 99% faster assembly of supplement history with Vault RIM.

Also, you can read our customer stories to get a direct account of the efficiency, customer success, and speed that Veeva is enabling for its customers.

While many applications have been built on the Veeva Vault content management platform, there are many other areas within Life Sciences to expand into. We are also expanding into adjacent verticals such as chemical manufacturing, cosmetics, and consumer packaged goods which represents a significant business opportunity.

We’ve had a significant impact on Life Sciences but we’re still in the early days of this journey. There’s plenty of opportunities to get involved, and that’s reason #2 for you to explore career opportunities at Veeva Systems.

High-Performance Culture

Last but not least, let’s look at reason #3: a high-performance culture.

While joining Veeva Systems will provide the unique learning opportunity of working on an industry-leading platform with an impact in accelerating the Life Sciences industry, it wouldn’t be complete without the right environment and culture.

Our culture is built on our Vision (Building the Industry Cloud for Life Sciences) and our Values (Do the Right Thing, Customer Success, Employee Success, and Speed).

Veeva brings together technologists and life sciences professionals to deliver next-generation applications with Customer Success always top-of-mind. We want our customers to love working with us. We execute with Speed.

Veeva has grown to a fairly large company at almost 4,000 employees, and we plan to grow to 10,000 by 2025. We won’t do this at the expense of our values, so we always try to ask ourselves if we’re Doing the Right Thing when making important decisions that affect our customers, our company, or Employee Success.

While Veeva is a large company, we align with clarity and execute with speed. We build cohesive teams and value autonomy over alignment.

This all amounts to a results-based culture where performance is rewarded. We want to find great people and help them carve out a career at Veeva Systems. We encourage internal transfers that can be initiated by employees to ensure personal and professional growth that allows them to perform at their best.

It is this results-driven culture where you can carve out a career that brings it all together for reason #3.

Intrigued?

If the learning opportunity, impact, and culture sound like a fit, and if you’re team-focused, skilled in your craft, a continuous learner, and driven to perform, please check out our engineering openings and give us a shout!

We have product development opportunities at our offices across the globe: Toronto; California, Boston, and numerous other US locations; United Kingdom, China, and Germany. If you’re in another area such as Sales, Marketing, Support, or Strategy, there’s a number of exciting opportunities available at our careers site.