Before joining Quantcast, I worked for a small machine learning consultancy building web-based services, tools, and front-end UX to support both internal and client engineering efforts. In between major consulting projects and in my spare time, I worked on Encapsule Project – a collection of MIT-licensed JavaScript language libraries and tools that enable developers to build web applications rapidly via software factories, JSON-configuration, reusable plug-in features and deep integration with Facebook’s extremely popular React UX framework.
I was having a good time and learning a lot, but when an old friend and former colleague called to tell me about a potential opportunity in Seattle, working directly with another friend of his on a large data project that’s “right up your alley,” I was curious. What is Quantcast? I did not know, but my friend urged me to follow-up. After an introduction and a phone call, we scheduled an informal in-person over coffee.
Our meeting was an interesting and candid discussion about a system Quantcast was working to build. We had a good back and forth dialogue about the challenges faced in implementing and supporting such a system. That day, I decided I wanted to do more than what I was currently doing.
After performing my own thorough search process and having the opportunity to speak with 30+ hiring managers from different companies about various projects, team structures and approaches to project management, I found myself more and more interested and impressed with Quantcast. In the end, I was offered opportunities from three different companies: a full-time remote position, a local startup that had recently raised Series B financing and Quantcast.
I joined Quantcast because of the calibre of their engineering team, their collaborative approach to product development and their openness to experiment and innovate in areas where there’s a clear need to do better. Additionally, Quantcast provides me the ability to continue learning about topics that I am interested in (such as storage, search strategies for massive datasets and machine learning models and algorithms for extracting insights from a sea of information). The company also provides an opportunity for me to work collaboratively with my team and other members of the organization; helping them to deliver exciting new products.