Engineering is a tough career path, requiring plenty of grit and mental stamina to learn the basics, specialize and stay on top of an unending stream of new developments and discoveries. So when engineers start their careers, many prefer to put all that knowledge to use in support of missions they believe in — and in workplaces filled with bright minds and engaging personalities.
Victoria Styner has found herself in a company that satisfies both of those desires. The full-stack engineer works for New York City-based Quartet, which aims to improve mental health care by centralizing patient interactions, data and notes through a single platform. In doing so, the company says it can erase the walls currently separating primary caregivers, mental health providers and insurance companies.
The company recently raised $60 million in funding to extend that functionality to social workers, case managers and other relevant parties. As the company continues to scale, we spoke with Styner — who is working on both patient and provider-facing software — to learn what it’s like to work on the company’s growing engineering team, and what sets it apart from the other organizations she’s worked at.
What is Quartet Health’s mission, and how does your work contribute to the company’s pursuit of its goals?
Quartet is a healthcare technology and services company on a mission to improve the lives of people with mental health conditions. When I joined the team, Quartet’s product engineering focus was mainly on our web experience. Since joining I have worked with the team on a “mobile first” development approach for our patient and provider-facing solutions.
Mobile first does not always equate to a mobile app. For the patient-facing product, I focused on increasing the performance and accessibility of the experience. We also explored features that would give the experience a more “native” flavor, like the ability to launch the app from a home screen and web-based push notifications. I am currently on a team building out a brand new React Native mobile application that allows our mental healthcare providers to initiate patients into care and to communicate with the patients’ primary care physicians.
You have worked as an engineer in a number of different organizations and industries during your career. What’s different or unique about working at Quartet Health?
The mission of the company and the quality of the engineers on the team. The mission is so motivating and resonates so personally with so many of us that people truly show up in earnest everyday and strive to make an impact. The engineers are some of the most intelligent, dedicated and funny people I have met in the industry. Being around dedicated engineers that are motivated is essential for your own growth, and makes development an enjoyable and challenging experience.
Architecting a product from the ground up is always an exciting and rare honor to savor.”
Tell us about the problems you solve when you come into work, and the technologies you’re using or building to accomplish those goals.
Quartet is scaling rapidly — from a product perspective and from a size perspective. As a team focused on code quality, we want to make sure we are committing to best practices, leaving room in sprints to address tech debt and giving high quality code reviews to our peers. Balancing that work with regular product work, scaling our services, interviewing and onboarding new employees and coaching more junior members of the team can be challenging.
We ensure there are lots of open discussions about everything going on and how we balance and prioritize the work. We use TypeScript and ESLint in both our React and React Native repositories to help enforce best practices. We have regular guild meetings where we decide the technical and architectural direction the team is taking. We also have operational excellence meetings where we track and address any issues that have surfaced in production.
How does Quartet Health welcome new engineering team members?
My grandmother was born in Rome, so my family structure exists around a dining room table. Quartet caters lunch twice a week and the entire company is in the habit of sitting down at long tables at noon to eat together. To me it’s an important way to grow relationships with my team and other teams at Quartet. Connecting on this level encourages compassion and builds trust, and casual conversation often opens creative doorways into the work we do as a team. Frequent pizza and beer-fueled game nights, random and official happy hours and a (usually) stocked beer fridge also help further the camaraderie on the team.
What are you most excited about for the future of your company?
The upcoming release of our first provider-facing mobile app has definitely been fueling the positive energy on the team. Architecting a product from the ground up is always an exciting and rare honor to savor. The caliber of the engineers, product and designers on the team with me has led to some great technical discussion, planning and execution. I feel like I’ve grown my development skills significantly from this project due to this collaboration. We’re all very excited to let the app out into the beta wilderness, and to iterate on functionality and design for a full release.
