U.S. businesswoman Mary Barra once said, “Do every job you’re in like you’re going to do it for the rest of your life, and demonstrate that ownership of it.”
For leaders at these 11 rapidly growing New York companies, the ability to take ownership is a key skill they’re searching for in candidates. With ambitious plans for growth and improvements in the year ahead, these leaders require talented technical team members — engineers, data scientists, product experts and more — who step up to claim responsibility for important projects and their results.
“Joining our team and taking true ownership of what we are building will lead to massive impact,” said Karan Chawla, senior vice president of product at 21.co. “We pride ourselves on embarking on a unique opportunity, and it takes individuals who share that passion and ownership of their work, no matter the scope.”
In addition to valuing collective accountability, the featured leaders repeatedly stressed the significance of curiosity, drive and a desire to learn — with some considering these traits just as critical as technical expertise.
“Having a foundation as a developer is key, but being inquisitive and exploratory are just as important,” said Anastasios Hamelos, product management director at MassMutual. “I want to surround myself and my team with individuals who are continuously looking to learn and grow both their careers and the organization.”
Built In New York connected with leaders at Peloton, Rokt, Newsela and eight other fast-growing companies to learn more about their teams’ cultures and big future projects, along with the qualities they’re looking for in candidates as they expand.
At Peloton, engineers confront unique challenges working on the company’s high-volume, ever-evolving interactive fitness platform. In the year ahead, Vice President of Cardio Software and Software Development Francis Shanahan says the fitness digital media company is dedicated to ensuring a seamless member experience for every workout.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Each new team member brings so much to the table that there’s no single thing we look for. If I had to highlight one trait that successful candidates generally have in common, it would be curiosity.
Our teams work on complex systems that are growing and evolving every day in terms of scale and functionality. There’s no single list of skills that I could document that would make you successful.
Instead, our engineers exercise continuous learning, and we encourage them to explore new techniques or approaches. A natural drive, born out of curiosity, is a tremendous asset.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
This year, our member base is bigger than ever, with new device launches and workout modalities driving member engagement to record levels.
With that context, we’re working really hard to ensure our members’ expectations are met whenever they want to work out. A Peloton workout is like no other — a live interactive experience. We can easily see 30,000 members in a single class, all reporting metrics every second, with high fives and leaderboard rankings all at very low latencies.
That presents some really interesting engineering challenges that are unique in the industry, so a lot of our focus is on innovation around scaling the experience and, at the same time, continuing to roll out exciting features to our member community.
Our engineers exercise continuous learning, and we encourage them to explore new techniques or approaches. A natural drive, born out of curiosity, is a tremendous asset.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
In a single word, ownership. Our goal is to hire the very best. We build really strong teams and then empower them to set their own goals and crush them.
As an engineering community, we’ve created a shared definition of ownership that covers deployment, service levels, decision-making, team contributions and pull requests. We are working each day to streamline our tooling, access and processes to allow our people to run (pun intended) as fast as they think they can and beyond.
Rokt allows big-name companies such as Live Nation, Groupon and Hello Fresh to grow their revenue and customer bases. Moving forward, Director of Engineering Tyler Gaw says his team is motivated to face its greatest technical challenge yet: rethinking the architecture of core systems powering the company’s e-commerce technology products.
What’s one skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Ownership. We look for team members who are comfortable taking responsibility and ownership, not just for one corner of a project or codebase. We look for individuals who can take a step back and own how their work impacts the entire business.
While we have individuals and teams that focus on certain specialties, Rokt is a place where everyone operates toward the common goal of building and nurturing products that make Rokt successful. We instill a sense of responsibility through end-to-end ownership, advocating customer centricity and aligning on the same set of goals and measurable outcomes.
At Rokt, taking ownership isn’t something reserved for the most senior team members. Every individual — from an intern to an engineer with 15 years of experience — can decide to take ownership.
From being a champion of improved documentation for a project to building a proof of concept for our next product, ownership can manifest in many ways. There’s no one path to ownership, and Rokt is the place where every team member can discover their path.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
As we continue to work toward a projected initial public offering in 2023, the biggest question we’re asking is “What’s next?”
For nearly a decade, we’ve had massive success pushing boundaries for what’s possible with our products and technology. Asking about what’s next leads us to what will be our biggest technical challenges to date. We’re sitting down and rethinking the architecture of core systems that power our products.
We’re doing this because we’re deciding what we want the next five to 10 years of success as a business to look like. What are the new products we’ll build to keep progressing and pushing boundaries? What technology can we use today that will set us up for that success tomorrow? How can we apply what we’ve learned through the technical hurdles we’ve overcome to the problems we’ll encounter during our next stage of rapid change?
The answers we come up with to these questions have a direct impact on the future opportunities for growth and overall business success.
There’s no one path to ownership, and Rokt is the place where every team member can discover their path.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Motivated. It may sound a bit cliché, but I chose that word because it’s a perfect description for the team at Rokt.
Every single person on the team shows up every day and pushes to improve themselves, our products and everyone around them. This isn’t an accident. When we’re hiring, we look for individuals who spend their careers and lives striving to learn new things.
We look for individuals who seek out opportunities to step outside their comfort zones and conquer new frontiers. We look for individuals who are also eager to help their teammates grow and progress.
These motivated, caring individuals are the only way we’re able to continue to push boundaries the way we do. Being curious and open to new experiences are part of our core values. We go to great lengths to ensure every individual who joins the team shares our values.
Motivation, drive, hunger — whatever word you pick for it, that’s what we have. We have an ingrained ambition to keep going, find out what’s next and grow in any way we can.
Technical teams at Newsela positively impact teachers and students by providing a platform of high-quality, classroom-friendly digital content. In 2023, the fully remote edtech company aims to build upon its recent investments in data and machine learning systems to deliver more personalized experiences for educators.
What’s one skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Initiative. The ability of the candidate to define, drive and deliver features that delight their customers.
I lead the content consumption organization, which is the medium through which our schools get access to our high-quality content. We have engineers with different skill sets, but my interview question to all of them is “Tell me about a feature that you are proud of.”
I’m looking for candidates who don’t simply share a laundry list of things, but those who take the time to talk about the “why” of building this feature and get excited when they talk about the customer problems, the impact the feature had on customers, the skeptical stakeholders they had to convince and the roadblocks they crossed.
It’s very enriching to hear such a diverse and varied set of challenges that different candidates had to solve to get here. It makes me very happy to be leading such a talented group of people.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
I always wanted to have an impact in edtech, so it was a straightforward decision for me to join Newsela, as it gives you the opportunity to make an impact on thousands of classrooms and millions of students.
An average teacher spends more than 20 percent of their time outside of the classroom building their classroom lesson plans, and we know that student engagement is even more challenging in the aftermath of remote learning. I’m very excited about our work in the area of knowledge paths, which is about personalizing the learning journey for every teacher and their classroom so that we provide meaningful classroom learning to all students.
In 2022, we made considerable investments in our data and machine learning systems that provide us a fuller picture of our educational domain. In 2023, we want to build on that to deliver a more personalized experience for the teachers across the entire academic year!
It was a straightforward decision for me to join Newsela, as it gives you the opportunity to make an impact on thousands of classrooms and millions of students.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Together. I like this word because it conveys the many different aspects of our team that make it phenomenal.
More than 50 percent of the team was formed after I joined. From the get-go, we were all in this as equals and found ways to support our onboarding and understanding of the technology and the domain while collaborating to fill gaps in our knowledge.
The team has surprised me many times with their self-organizing capabilities in welcoming new teammates — scheduling meetings with them, going over our system, answering their questions in Slack and ensuring they get the best support to be successful.
At Garner Health, a healthtech company that connects employees to high-quality providers, technical leaders value curiosity and being able to learn independently. Moving forward, the data science engineering team is excited to continue its work transforming healthcare data and computer science.
What’s one skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Data science engineers are often tasked with developing solutions to novel problems in both conceptual and technical spaces. This kind of work requires comfortability in working with the unknown and a penchant for learning.
For that reason, the most important skill set to be a successful candidate for my team is autodidactism — the ability to learn independently. Being autodidactic requires high levels of curiosity, metacognition, grit and analytical thinking.
This is not to say that folks on my team work entirely independently. In fact, that’s about as far away from the truth as you can get. By cultivating a high degree of autodidactism, we ensure that every member can meaningfully contribute to every conversation.
We use this skill to launch our design sessions and allow us to quickly arrive at the best solutions to our problems. It’s what allows us to grow together as a team and lean on each other when we need help. Ultimately, it ends up being one of the major motivators for working hard every day — the opportunity to grow independently, together.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
My team works on some of the core intellectual property at Garner, so unfortunately I can’t divulge too much about the biggest projects that we intend to tackle in 2023.
What I can say is that the vast majority of the projects are greenfield, and they’re equal in size to the largest modules that power our algorithms. The projects will require deep knowledge of healthcare, healthcare data and computer science. We’ll be in the (metaphorical) trenches of all three fields at the same time in order to produce insights that no other organization has access to.
The result of these projects will be a set of new technologies that will enable continual discovery for years to come.
Curiosity is the substrate of everything that we work on as a larger technical team, which creates an absolutely phenomenal place to work.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Curiosity is the substrate of everything that we work on as a larger technical team, which creates an absolutely phenomenal place to work. It drives us from discovery to deployment, and it inhabits the spaces in between.
A deep sense of curiosity is present in our work with one another. It pops up in the obvious places — design sessions, bug hunting and feature development — as well as in the not-so-obvious places — the lunch table, retrospectives and celebrations.
It's the grease that lubricates our work, enables us to have challenging conversations and, ultimately, brings us an immense amount of fulfillment in our work.
Engineers at Odeko are passionate about helping the owners of independent coffee shops, cafes and other small businesses by providing them with supply chain management software. Over the next year, the social impact software company is looking to support its customers through expanded offerings such as mobile app order-ahead services.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
There’s more than one trait, of course, but the one I want to highlight is critical thinking.
A lot of us became engineers in order to solve problems for people. In order to leverage critical thinking skills, one must ask the “why” and know who the end user is for the software being created. Engineers who actively seek this information in order to make good business decisions that support the “why” and the end user are most successful.
We strive to build a team that prides itself on the desire to seek to understand, which leads to autonomy within the team and the ability to make decisions quickly and seamlessly. Our engineers question assumptions and love working hand in hand with product, data, operations and design to create things that our customers love.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
The project that I want to highlight for 2023 is our expansion from supply chain optimization to the additional services that small businesses need to compete and win. For example, we are already experimenting with order-ahead services so that indie coffee shops can take orders from mobile apps.
We are moving toward creating a giant ecosystem of services so we can fulfill the promise of being the “franchise stack” for small businesses. Small business owners seek partners who can provide tools to make their operations more streamlined in areas such as staffing, payroll, content, financing and marketing.
We’re on a huge mission to be the magic behind our customers’ dreams becoming a reality, and supply chain and order ahead are just the beginning of the journey.
Our Odeko engineering team cares deeply about our work and making a difference for the small business owners who depend on us to continue growing their business dreams.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
I would use the word care. Our Odeko engineering team cares deeply about our work and making a difference for the small business owners who depend on us to continue growing their business dreams.
Even more importantly, we care about each other. We care about how we work with each other. We care about helping each other, teaching each other what we know and having fun with each other. It’s a wonderful, collective mission that we’re on, backed by a community that cares about the right things.
At ActionIQ, provider of a customer experience hub, the engineering team celebrates having a growth mindset — literally — by nominating colleagues to receive “growth mindset award plants.” In the year ahead, Vice President of Engineering Steve McColl is excited for his team to work on a challenging new feature that helps clients better leverage their customer data.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
One character trait that helps our employees be successful at ActionIQ is curiosity.
Our employees want to deeply understand our challenges and opportunities as we continue to build great, scalable solutions, and this curiosity helps them acquire more information and assess how to find the right approach to build great software for all our clients.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
There are a number of interesting and important projects that are on our roadmap. In a close second place would be our investment in mixed-mode data processing, the blend of batch and real-time customer data.
My top pick is our development of HybridCompute, a feature that extends the capabilities of our platform to leverage our clients’ investments in data lake and cloud data companies such as Snowflake, Databricks and Teradata.
This is an exciting project for us because it is technically challenging to extend the rich feature set of our product across additional storage and query platforms while simultaneously providing a seamless experience for our clients. HybridCompute is important to the success of ActionIQ, as it enables our clients to increase the value they have from all their customer data — a core value of our business.
We celebrate a growth mindset that enables us to take risks and learn new things that are aligned with the needs of our clients and ActionIQ as a whole.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
I would choose “growth” because it is something that we intentionally focus on every day — how our personal, team and departmental growth can enable the successful growth of our business as a whole.
We celebrate a growth mindset that enables us to take risks and learn new things that are aligned with the needs of our clients and ActionIQ as a whole while fostering personal growth and development.
We literally celebrate a growth mindset. If you stop by our offices or are on a Zoom with one of our remote engineers, you may see a growth mindset award plant growing on their desk! It’s an award received following nominations from peers.
Technical teams at healthtech company Aetion are motivated to improve medical treatments and technologies for patients around the world. Throughout the next year, the engineering team is prioritizing software quality and testing technologies to ensure high quality and security throughout its software development life cycle.
What character traits should a successful candidate have to land a spot on your team?
Individuals who are demonstrably passionate about software craftspersonship, love writing code, enjoy understanding how things work and have a good time breaking and then fixing software will have a high potential for success at Aetion.
It’s also important to note the right mix of technical aptitude and a positive attitude are essential characteristics of any prospective candidate. At Aetion, we have unique engineering challenges that require individuals who identify as high-performing lifelong learners.
Those who enjoy big picture, long-term strategic work — in addition to being able to expeditiously deliver business value with thoughtful, can-do attitudes — are indispensable to our company’s overall success. Mix in a good amount of hungry, humble and smart, and we have a winning recipe.
At Aetion, we have unique engineering challenges that require individuals who identify as high-performing lifelong learners.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Aetion’s quality engineering team is working to bring all aspects of software quality and the various testing disciplines to the forefront of the company’s engineering culture and software development life cycle.
We are building testing technologies to enable everyone throughout the company to, first, verify that our software is meeting expectations and, second, better understand whenever it is not — and why.
The goal is to supercharge our organization’s software development, delivery and support capabilities as well as enhance how we work together. At Aetion, we are developing fail fast and shift left capabilities to detect bugs as early as possible, and we are benefitting from the corresponding cost savings. This is being activated by spearheading a variety of exciting technology and behavioral initiatives to improve the relationships between developers and testers, as well as our scientists, product and business partners.
Ultimately, our testing tools provide actionable information via continuous feedback mechanisms, enforcing quality controls and security standards throughout the software development life cycle, and empowering everyone to work with testability at the top of mind.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Growth best describes Aetion’s tech team culture. It’s also the collective mindset of the broader organization, with a true dedication to continuously and iteratively improving all that we do to deliver value to customers and patients.
Investing time, attention and effort in innovation is a very exciting aspect of working within our team and is an important aspect of our technology ethos.
As we improve how Aetion captures our software’s requirements, using excellent acceptance criteria and other progressive disciplines, we can fuel innovation and empower our teams to create, test, deliver and support software to exceed our customers’ expectations.
As the organization continues to grow, the opportunities Aetion has to leverage progressive test-first, agile practices are unmatched. This is a special organization that offers unparalleled chances to do super cool, tech-specific work in a collaborative environment that allows technologists to use their skills to best serve the organization and our customers and ultimately improve treatment options for patients all over the world.
As a startup helping launch other innovative healthtech startups, Redesign Health is seeking technical team members who are flexible problem solvers. Head of Product, Startup Creation and Data Science Doug Bemis also notes that empathy is key when working with end users and teammates as they work to transform the healthcare industry.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Flexibility is a key character trait that is necessary to succeeding within any startup environment. We are a startup that enables the creation of startups, so it is doubly important at Redesign Health to be able to adapt and work constructively to solve any problem that might come up.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We are creating a technology platform to supercharge healthcare innovation. This platform infrastructure is the evolution of our core intellectual property — our approach to successfully launching new health businesses into the world.
As a result, the companies we build can ultimately benefit from economies of scale while also driving down the cost and risk associated with product innovation. This effort is critical to the business, enabling us to exponentially scale our efforts to redesign health for all.
When we have empathy for one another, we can go further together as a team and fulfill the ambitious goals we have for transforming healthcare.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Empathy. This goes for both our users and our teammates. When we focus on building technology leveraging empathy for the end user — really understanding their pain and their needs — we can create and unlock value for them in a way that’s truly undeniable.
When we have empathy for one another, we can go further together as a team and fulfill the ambitious goals we have for transforming healthcare. That’s the culture that drives this incredible team.
At 21.co, a provider of crypto portfolio management software, Senior Vice President of Product Karan Chawla sees endless opportunities for technical team members to make a big impact by introducing efficient technology to the traditional finance industry. Chawla says that new hires can expect to join a collaborative, welcoming team that has a passion for cryptocurrency and a desire to succeed.
What’s one skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Ownership. Being at a startup that bridges an established industry to cutting-edge technology — in our case, traditional finance to cryptocurrency — means that there are endless opportunities.
Joining our team and taking true ownership of what we are building will lead to massive impact. We pride ourselves on embarking on a unique opportunity, and it takes individuals who share that passion and ownership of their work, no matter the scope.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
As crypto becomes more mainstream, there will continue to be more overlap with the traditional finance world. This is our mission, and our technical team’s mission is to find unique solutions that enable merging the best of both worlds to delight our customers with unique products.
We are a full-stack crypto native issuer, which means our product roadmap is focused on leveraging our strengths to develop products that investors may not have had access to in the traditional world.
Everyone who joins us has a passion for crypto, and with that comes a common desire to succeed.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Collaborative. Everyone who joins us has a passion for crypto, and with that comes a common desire to succeed.
We have an environment where everyone is excited about what we are building and enjoys working together. Our teams have been growing fast, and still, each new joiner always seems to note how welcoming and eager everyone is to work together.
This is core to our culture, and we are always looking for even more ways to ensure our teams are growing through their work and also learning from each other.
Mulberry provides a web browser extension that allows consumers to get protection and savings for their online retail purchases. On the company’s small technical team, Data Scientist Justin Trenor says employees collaborate with colleagues and grow their skill sets. In the year ahead, Trenor is eager to work on a shopping protection feature that enables users to request partial refunds if the prices of their purchased items decrease.
What character traits should a successful candidate have to land a spot on your team?
As a startup with a relatively small technical team, I think the most important traits a candidate should have include open mindedness and a willingness to learn.
There are many impactful projects to tackle across the business, so most of us have come across something with which we have no experience. Gathering opinions from teammates with more relevant experience and taking the time to research the task at hand are important skills, both for growing yourself as an engineer and for improving Mulberry’s sustainability.
As a startup with a relatively small technical team, I think the most important traits a candidate should have include open mindedness and a willingness to learn.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We have many projects in the works right now, but the one I am most excited about is the introduction of shopping protection in our core product suite. This allows our users to file claims for partial refunds if the prices of the items they purchased decrease.
Offering this new protection opens the door for countless technical projects. From the basics of displaying the correct price for a given plan to personalizing the extension’s response based on user behavior, the opportunities for our technical teams to optimize user engagement and experience are endless.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Supportive — in both a technical, team-oriented sense and in a personal, quality of life context. Ultimately, we all want to build features and services that will help improve Mulberry’s success. All ideas are carefully considered, and everyone is willing to help execute on the most impactful projects.
At MassMutual, a life insurance and financial services company, Product Management Director Anastasios Hamelos says the technical team is made up of passionate, creative innovators. Moving forward, Hamelos is committed to improving customers’ ability to self-service online.
What’s one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Drive. It is critical to the success of the team that an individual has the drive to learn, help others and show passion about their work.
Drive means expressing curiosity in new technology. For example, many people find their way to our team with only front-end development experience but have the interest and willingness to learn the back end. Having a foundation as a developer is key, but being inquisitive and exploratory are just as important on the digital experience team at MassMutual.
I want to surround myself and my team with individuals who are continuously looking to learn and grow both their careers and the organization. Drive spreads throughout a team and motivates others. I’ve worked in technology for about 15 years now, and I’ve seen that when individuals are driven, the team is more inclined to produce quality work at a faster pace.
The team also gets more engaged with the product and technology, leading to ideation, innovation and exploration of new solutions and opportunities, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Staying ahead of current digital trends as they relate to our customers’ needs is my team’s (the preferences and electronics notifications team) primary focus. We’re always seeking better patterns and experiences for customers to self-service and manage their document delivery and notifications online.
Providing customers the ability to quickly self-service online and make changes on the fly as needed is a goal I strive for. Anything that enhances the customer’s overall experience motivates me and my team to collaborate, ideate and think creatively. That is what I enjoy most about my work at MassMutual: We’re given the opportunity to explore more intuitive processes and solutions for our customers.
Being creative makes work more fun and spurs the drive that I mentioned earlier. It also fosters an engaging environment where the team looks forward to working with one another. Participating in great projects with a tremendous group of people brightens my day and keeps me looking forward to tomorrow!
We are constantly innovating, collaborating and working to enhance the customer experience because, at the end of the day, it is all about the customers.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Passionate. My team is not just looking to do operational work but also creative work, generating new ideas and bringing them to light. We are constantly innovating, collaborating and working to enhance the customer experience because, at the end of the day, it is all about the customers.
After working at MassMutual for more than three years, I realize that this organizational passion can be a spark that helps build team and organizational retention longer term.
