Engineering Spotlight: Connie Wang
Connie Wang | Senior Software Engineer
Tell me a bit about yourself? Who you are and what’s your background?
Hey everyone, I’m Connie! I’m a Senior Software Engineer on the Carrier Management team at Vouch, where I work on backend services that manage and enable our proprietary insurance products. I was born and raised in New Jersey, went to college in Chicago, and now I live in Manhattan, New York.
Why did you choose to be an engineer?
My career journey was a little unconventional — I studied Piano Performance and Cognitive Science as my undergraduate majors at Northwestern University. I was first introduced to computer science through my cognitive modeling and human-computer interaction classes. I became interested in the technical aspects of this work and what practical applications these theories have for the digital world we live in today. I took some basic computer science courses and realized that the process of learning a computer language and building something felt very similar to me as the process of studying and performing music. It was a fascinating parallel to discover, so I decided to explore this further after graduating by enrolling in a bootcamp program for full stack web development.
The bootcamp was an intense but exhilarating three months of fully immersing my brain in programming — there were many nights where I dreamt about my code and the projects I was working on. As crazy as it was, I loved the experience and was excited to take these new concepts and apply them to the real world.
Tell me a bit about your overall career journey. How did you get to where you are now?
After graduating from my bootcamp, I joined what was then a seven person seed stage startup. Our engineering team consisted of three people, we worked with our product person who was also our designer every day, and we had daily standups with the entire company including our CEO. I loved the early stage startup experience — it was so exciting participating in the full lifecycle of a feature and watching my code go out to production every day.
I quickly learned the difficulty of finding product-market fit, and the challenging role funding played in the prioritization of features and product direction. I also learned humility and how important it was to set aside pride and being willing to start all over again, which our team did one pivotal summer where we built a fully functioning marketplace in three months.
Our company went through several rounds of funding, and we grew into a team of over 60 employees. Through this process I encountered many difficulties related to scaling, both on the technical and organizational sides. It was a really exciting and fun journey, but after four years, I was ready for a change and found Vouch!
How’s your experience been at Vouch since you joined us?
Initially what drew me to Vouch was the people and culture that I felt during my interviews. I immediately felt welcomed and supported, even during stressful technical interviews which is a rarity! During the onboarding process, I was happy to discover that my initial feelings were indeed correct. I was so impressed with how thoughtfully everyone talked about Vouch’s values and culture and it gave me confidence that I made the right choice in joining Vouch.
During my time here at Vouch, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a pretty wide variety of projects. Something cool we’ve been working on in the past year is getting started on work to decompose our Ruby on Rails monolith into Typescript services. It’s been a great learning experience being part of that process, from the planning to the implementation and rollout. Another great learning experience and one that is more unique of Vouch is being able to work directly with our actuarial team and work on projects to support their work. All in all, I can confidently say that I have a much better understanding of insurance now than when I first started (which was close to nothing), and that has turned out to have some very helpful applications in my personal life!
What’s life like outside of Vouch?
Outside of work I like to explore new places via travel and hiking. I also try to stay involved with local community organizations in New York City. I was previously on the volunteer board for a nonprofit organization called Taiwanese American Professionals, where we hosted various cultural and social events throughout the year. While I am no longer on the board I still like to volunteer and support various initiatives when I can.
