Jon Loos

My role as Head of Engineering is to write, maintain, design and deliver high quality code to our client every day. Having been a developer for many years I am able to build, test and launch large projects independently. Now being the head of engineering I am fortunate to be managing a large team of elite developers, and consider their work as a multiplier of my own. The time I spend defining technical initiatives and distributing the work to the team is valuable in that it translates directly into work output. To empower my team, I strongly promote knowledge sharing and recognizing achievements when great work is performed. To track the work, I track the cycle time per story point as my most effective key performance indicator.

Being part of a smaller team has helped me mature in my professional field very quickly. By virtue of having more responsibilities, I have had the opportunity to own many different sizes of projects during my tenure which forced me into various domains of development and management. My skills have developed rapidly, and I am now able to provide a very holistic perspective of technical feasibility, value proposition and timeline estimation to clients on large scale projects. Managing a large piece of software with a small team has been daunting. However, we all are better suited to appreciate the true scale of delivering value in software as a result. From traditional development to managerial responsibilities and advising the client on strategic focuses for the platform, I have learned that I thrive in smaller more focused teams.

In a typical agile-esque style, my answer to this question will focus on setting targets with clients and how those targets may change with time. The only way to stay on target given requirement changes is to change the approach & software itself. By delivering constant value to our clients we also receive constant validation from them for the value of our work. We have created an environment that is both quick and safe to deploy code to, enabled by striving for simplicity and great developer experience. Over the past few years I have observed the impact that quick delivery has had on our platform: it builds trust with our clients, it builds confidence in our developers and it creates a community centered around constant improvement.

"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." - William Shakespeare

I believe that having a broad skill set allows me to fully appreciate the scope of a change, and that being a balanced worker is an invaluable skill to have. While I still have lots to learn in specific domains, the value I output is defined by the whole instead of the sum of its parts.

• Ruby on Rails
• AngularJS
• HTML5
• CSS
• User Interface (UI)
• Docker
• Microsoft Azure