You know a company culture is strong when you can feel it during the initial interview.
That was the experience of Amelia Van Camp when interviewing for her role as director of people operations at Mirakl. Since accepting the job three and a half years ago, she said she still feels as “inspired” as she did during her interview. Case in point: when COVID-19 hit, employees at Mirakl built a marketplace to help hospitals get access to much-needed medical supplies.
Van Camp and five more professionals from Boston’s fast-growing tech scene told us how company culture impacts their career development and how it motivates them to perform better at their companies. The results lend themselves to interesting projects with cutting-edge technology like robots and NLP, thoughtful and supportive team members who send care packages for sick days, impactful influence on their communities and more.
What they do: At Humana Studio_h, software engineers, healthcare experts and data scientists combine experience design and technology to make populations healthier.
Describe your company culture in one word: “Persistent,” Greg Hayworth, a data science fellow, said.
Explain more. “We are consistently looking for ways to improve the health of our members,” Hayworth said. “Sometimes we do this through the application of advanced technology like natural language processing (NLP) and other times through simple acts of compassion like delivering a meal to a person in need. The common thread through all of our work is to use the unique skills and talents of each of our associates to persistently chip away at the things that aren’t working in the healthcare system.”
We are consistently looking for ways to improve the health of our members.”
What’s the coolest project you've worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
“We recently used natural language processing and image processing to make our administrative work a little better,” Hayworth said. “Lots of communication in the healthcare system still happens with fax machines. When we need clinical evidence to support decisions around patient care, medical offices often send us faxes containing that clinical documentation. A fax is fuzzy, the pages can be rotated different directions and it is not searchable. What our team has done is built an automated process that can take that fax and convert it into a searchable file with all the pages rotated the right direction. We are able to find details about the patient in the contents of the text and send that document to the right nurse on our staff. When the nurse opens the document they are able to see some of the most relevant clinical facts already highlighted and annotated in the document.”
What they do: According to research by Digital360, consumers spent $2 trillion on online marketplaces in 2019, accounting for 58 percent of global e-commerce sales. For businesses looking to sell products on their website, Mirakl helps them launch their own online marketplace platforms. Their SaaS solution caters to both B2C and B2B businesses.
Describe your company culture in one word: “Inspiring,” Director of People Operations Amelia Van Camp said.
During my interview process, everyone I met inspired me to be a better version of myself.”
Explain more. “I joined Mirakl at a time when we were still a small operation of less than 10 people in Boston,” Van Camp said. “During my interview process, everyone I met inspired me to be a better version of myself. From their intelligence to their kindness and wit, they were, and still are, an incredibly motivating group of individuals. This has remained true even as we have scaled the business to more than 300 people — and growing. We brought on board pioneers within their respective fields who are passionate about creating and building alongside their colleagues and peers.
“I remember speaking to people outside of Mirakl who have said they want to be part of an organization that has a humanitarian focus. I always thought, as a platform business, we didn’t have the same level of humanitarian impact as a non-profit, but the team challenged me to think differently. When the pandemic hit, we realized there was an opportunity to use our technology for the greater good. We built the StopCOVID19 marketplace to help hospitals and health centers get access to supplies that were in short supply. The StopCOVID19 marketplace was built in 48 hours, and within two months, over 49 million products were sold or donated.
“Our tradition of inspiring has remained very relevant, even as we have grown, and I am extremely proud of our ability to maintain this value.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
“I have been with Mirakl for more than three and a half years and have experienced a significant amount of growth in my career,” Van Camp said. “We are firm believers in giving our teams space to explore and getting them exposed to other areas of the business. It helps us to remain agile and enables our teams to get a broader level of experience than they might get from a more siloed organization. Plus, it creates a great environment for creative problem-solving. Growth is something that is possible for everyone here, regardless of what your function is.”
What they do: Alert Innovation specializes in eGrocery tech using their Alphabot platform. They build microservice fulfillment center technology that will allow grocers to support online ordering profitably. Their next step is to build an automated service grocer called Novastore.
Describe your company culture in one word. “Caring,” Co-founder and CTO Bill Fosnight said.
Explain more. “Everyone is always willing to lend each other a hand or offer their support,” Fosnight said. “As our robots continuously serve grocery customers, testing of new software features often occurs late at night. Anytime someone needs to test, there is always someone who is willing to help immediately. No one in leadership has ever had to ask someone to work late or help someone else. Alertians are driven by their genuine care for each other and their passion to make people’s lives better with our technology.”
Everyone is always willing to lend each other a hand or offer their support.”
What’s the coolest project you've worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
“I’ve recently been working on a solution that enables our robots to deliver grocery orders directly to customers’ cars,” Fosnight said. “It gave me and a systems engineer the opportunity to learn a lot about the challenges of deploying automation in a grocery store parking lot.”
What they do: Buoy Health uses AI to remove biases in the healthcare system. Their smart systems checker “Buoy” uses proprietary data and machine learning to help patients receive their best treatment.
Describe your company culture in one word. “Caring,” Product Manager Brett Cooke said.
Explain more. “I’m constantly blown away by how kind my co-workers are,” Cooke said. “Just a few months into the job, I was home with a fever. A teammate randomly Slack messaged me asking for my home address. To my surprise, about a half hour later, a delicious Boloco lunch showed up at my door! Looking back, I don’t think I had ever even mentioned I liked that spot. At Buoy, people pay attention and take care of you from the moment you have your first interview.”
I’m constantly blown away by how kind my co-workers are.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
“I’ve been at Buoy for about two and a half years,” Cooke said. “As we’ve scaled, there’s been no shortage of growth opportunities, both vertical and horizontal. I was originally hired as a software engineer, and my primary responsibilities were reading and writing code. After about a year, I became an engineering manager and dedicated more time to coaching, reviewing code, interviewing and improving our processes.
“More recently, Buoy recognized the need for a new product manager. I had thought about transitioning from engineering to product for a few years. At Buoy, I actually felt empowered to be vulnerable and knew I'd have the support from my manager and teammates to make the transition successfully. Today, I’m wireframing, running user tests, defining tasks and planning feature rollouts. Throughout all the change, the constant has been the opportunity for challenge and continued learning, all with the comfort of knowing my team will always support me in my career journey.”
What they do: Takeoff’s mission is for customers to find fresh and affordable groceries online. Their automated grocery software can be placed anywhere, allowing grocers to save on mileage and assembly costs.
Describe your company culture in one word: “Ambitious,” Akanksha Jain-Taylor, the product lead of client self-service tools, said.
Explain more. “The one thing that I find in every Takeoff employee, regardless of which team they are on, is an ambitious spirit and a drive to do more for each other and our customers,” Jain-Taylor said. “Whether it is as small as picking up a piece of work or as large as asking if what we are doing will add customer value, everyone I’ve met is thinking about a sustainable, long-term way to solve our customers’ problems. It is very inspiring to work with a team that is continually thinking about future problems and planning ahead.”
It is very inspiring to work with a team that is continually thinking about future problems and planning ahead.”
What’s the coolest project you've worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
“In order to smooth and standardize our client onboarding process, we wanted to create a simple educational tool that our clients could access at any time,” Jain-Taylor said. “We put together a cross-functional team of people who are involved in multiple facets of the process. Some designers, writers and a product lead are creating a playbook that will drastically simplify client communication and onboarding. As a company, we knew that we had a major need to fulfill. It was really cool to quickly bring together a 'tiger team' from so many different functions and deliver a user-friendly and valuable tool in just a few weeks.”
What they do: Alignable’s network helps connect more than 5 million small business owners online. Members can drive leads and prospects, generate referrals, land new business and build relationships.
Describe your company culture in one word. “Mission,” Senior Software Engineer Robert O’Neill said.
At the start of the pandemic the team quickly built out a Coronavirus Resource Center stocked with articles on how to apply for government loans.”
Explain more. “At the start of the pandemic the team quickly built out a Coronavirus Resource Center stocked with articles on how to apply for government loans, how to network and market online and how other small businesses were coping with the pandemic,” O’Neill said. “In conjunction with Harvard Business School, we launched a series of weekly polls designed to capture how small businesses across the country were feeling the economic effects of the virus. The data collected from these polls was shared widely with various news organizations and Congress to help inform policy decisions.”
What’s the coolest project you've worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
“I’ve recently focused on improving business categorization on Alignable,” O’Neill said. “The small business ecosystem is tremendously diverse. Our members include real estate agents, plumbers, restaurateurs, Lego artists, marching band shoe manufacturers and ironing board cover designers. We needed a categorization system flexible enough to capture this diversity yet structured enough to allow us to represent and speak to members as a group.”
