Next to buying a house, purchasing a car is one of the biggest financial decisions someone will ever make. There’s a company out there working to redefine how people think about this entire process, and while New York likes to think it has cornered the East Coast tech market, you won’t find this company’s office in the Big Apple.
Likewise, you can find plenty of cybersecurity roles in Silicon Valley at companies that describe themselves as “on the cutting edge.” That’s far from the only region of the country where you can go to add items like “blockchain” and “nanotech” to your resume, though.
Chicago is both a windy city and a hub for consultants and fintech. Of course, you don’t need to develop a taste for deep dish if you want to build financial tech used by some of the financial industry’s biggest players.
Boston is where you need to go to find these unique opportunities and so many more. The city is filled with companies whose goal is nothing short of building technology to redefine their industries and dominate the competition — companies like the six featured here, which are all hiring now.
IntelyCare is a staffing platform that matches nurses with healthcare facilities in need of caregivers, including nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and companies offering home visits. Its platform is powered by artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, which continually optimizes its matching and pricing engines.
What unique element of IntelyCare’s culture or product makes it a rocket ship that will ultimately blitz all its competition?
We combine the smartest marketplace for nursing with unmatched support for our clients and nurses. Uniquely, we have training and educational programs to ensure the quality of our nursing professionals, as well as success managers who build personal relationships with them. The machine learning behind our pricing, matching and liquidity models allows us to fill more shifts than anyone else, and we can provide that same technology to facilities and organizations that want to use it to optimize their own staffing model and float pool.
The machine learning behind our pricing, matching and liquidity models allows us to fill more shifts than anyone else.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and what did you enjoy most about it?
We recently extended the capabilities of our platform to support longer-term block and contract bookings. From a business perspective, we’re recognizing that while nursing professionals want flexibility in how and when they work, many also like the predictability of a longer relationship. For care facilities, the longer term provides valuable consistency of care.
From a technology perspective, this was a complex feature that allowed for negotiations of whether the nurse will work some or all of the shifts, and it takes our pricing algorithms and applies them to the longer-term commitment. We also created internal tools to support viewing and managing the longer blocks and contracts and updated the UI of our mobile app to easily show both types of “inventory.”
The overall design of this feature came from having tried to support longer-term blocks manually and working closely with both sides of the marketplace. That helped us understand the importance of the negotiation phase and of giving the facility control to accept or not accept a specific nurse. Our design team did a great job on the complex negotiation UI!
Flexcar is taking a new approach to leasing a car, ditching contracts and monthly payments for a no-commitment model with weekly payments. The Boston-based company is currently active in several major cities, including Atlanta and Nashville, and offers everything from economy cars to luxury SUVs.
What unique element of Flexcar’s culture makes it a rocket ship that will ultimately blitz all its competition?
Our incredible growth and all that we’ve built can be attributed to two essential factors. First and foremost, it’s the people. No matter who you are or where you’re from, this is a place where you can come to work and instantly feel like you belong and have an opportunity to make an immediate impact. Second is our extreme focus on our customers. Every decision we make gives us the chance to decide to do what’s right for them, and it’s hard to overstate how rewarding that feels. The mission here is clear, and the empowerment is real.
This is a place where you can come to work and instantly feel like you belong and have an opportunity to make an immediate impact.”
What’s the biggest rocket ship-fueling project that you’re currently working on, and what do you enjoy most about it?
Right now we are reinventing the entire notion of fleet management with a complete ground-up build of never-before-seen capabilities. It’s a total end-to-end system starting from the core telematics package installed in vehicles to the applications that enable fleet-operations teams to handle the right tasks at just the right time. But there are still 1,000 important problems that need a solution or an invention, and for me, that’s where the thrill of building really is.
Before it was acquired by the consulting firm McKinsey in 2015, QuantumBlack was a data analytics company with a focus on Formula One racing. Today, the outfit is McKinsey’s artificial intelligence innovation lab; the team helps the firm’s clients unlock the full potential of both AI and their data.
What unique element of QuantumBlack’s culture makes it a rocket ship that will ultimately blitz all its competition?
Our commitment to continuous learning and professional development. On the client technical delivery path we are encouraged to undertake up to 200 hours of learning, which includes external conferences, internal trainings, online courses and other self-paced curriculum. My mentor actively works with me to shape my development journey. No other organization I have seen has such a strong commitment to people development, which is one of our core values.
No other organization I have seen has such a strong commitment to people development.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and what did you enjoy most about it?
The coolest project I have worked on recently is a full-scale analytics transformation of a healthcare organization. We employed tree-ensemble models and explainable AI techniques to model physician engagement, as well as constrained linear optimization to allocate their resources. We built the capability of their team, developed and productionized our modeling solution, and enabled the client to take our work and scale it internally. It was one of the most challenging but also rewarding projects I have ever worked on!
Ably Realtime offers a suite of APIs designed to help companies more easily build real-time experiences. These experiences include in-app tracking of rideshare and food delivery drivers, online gaming chat rooms and push notifications, and virtual whiteboards for online courses.
What unique element of Ably Realtime’s product makes it a rocket ship that will ultimately blitz all its competition?
Real-time collaborative experiences are part of our everyday lives, but they are quite difficult for software teams to build, and they’re complex and costly to manage at scale with the performance that users demand. Imagine needing to deliver messages to any device anywhere in the world in under 100 milliseconds — which humans perceive as instantaneous — and then scaling that to millions of simultaneous users!
Ably’s platform enables companies to quickly build and deliver new and better live and collaborative experiences by removing all of the technical and operational risks. Developers gain a strategic technology that meets their requirements now and in the future with free rein to innovate without risk.
Imagine needing to deliver messages to any device anywhere in the world in under 100 milliseconds.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and what did you enjoy most about it?
We just released a report on how companies build and deliver live and collaborative real-time digital experiences. The survey of 500 engineering leaders made it clear that teams need to deliver more innovation faster and make sure it doesn’t fall over when it’s successful. Yet 65 percent of companies who built their solutions in-house had an outage or significant downtime in the past 12 to 18 months, and it took over 10 person-months on average just to build the infrastructure.
Ably helps by removing all of the technical and operational risks associated with building and scaling live and collaborative experiences. We recently helped Mentimeter, an audience engagement platform that event hosts use to offer real-time Q&As, quizzes, surveys and more to cope with huge spikes in demand; a single event can drive connections from zero to more than 70,000 participants in seconds. They were able to get a proof of concept up and running within two hours, and even though their developer team was stretched at the time, migration to Ably was complete inside a month.
DUST Identity builds technology that connects physical items to the digital world using “diamond unclonable security tags,” or “dust,” and the blockchain. These security tags enable companies to verify the authenticity of an item, track its history and be alerted if a product is tampered with.
What unique element of DUST Identity’s culture makes it a rocket ship that will ultimately blitz all its competition?
There are three qualities that stand out about our team: a learning mindset, a team-first mentality and our hacker ethos. We see each technical challenge as a puzzle and are humbled by our recognition that through grit, experimentation, learning and the collective strength of our team, it is only a matter of time until we find a solution. To reach our potential as a team and a company, there will be many known and unknown obstacles, but those intrinsic qualities give me confidence that we will succeed.
How can one not be excited when you’re building something that doesn’t exist and has the potential to create tremendous value for the world?”
What’s the biggest rocket ship-fueling project that you’re currently working on, and what do you enjoy most about it?
The “anchored digital thread.” Providing data interoperability from a privacy-first mindset has the potential to not only disrupt supply chain manufacturing but any market that deals in physical things. Our solution will dramatically reduce cost, unlock new business opportunities and bring greater digital and physical trust for our customers and their products. How can one not be excited when you’re building something that doesn’t exist and has the potential to create tremendous value for the world?
Galatea Associates is a consulting firm that specializes in building software for investment banks. It offers solutions for settling transactions involving securities and cash, algorithms that optimize securities portfolios for use in lending and as collateral, and models for managing risk.
What unique element of Galatea’s culture makes it a rocket ship that will ultimately blitz all its competition?
Galatea has a very sustainable and open culture, which differentiates it from other consulting firms. My project lead regularly checks in to see how I’m enjoying my work and asks me about my professional development goals. We value open and direct communication, which makes it easy to voice any concerns about my project or career. Plus, when I do raise an issue it’s taken seriously, and my project lead works with me to find a solution that works for the team and I.
For example, if I’ve been pulling some long hours and am concerned about burnout, I can ask for more comp time. If I feel my work has become a bit repetitive, my project lead will work with me to find a task that’s in line with what I’d like to learn next.
We value open and direct communication, which makes it easy to voice any concerns about my project or career.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and what did you enjoy most about it?
The biggest feature I’ve contributed to my project so far is the limit calculators. Limit calculation is a regulatory requirement in certain markets that requires our inventory management system to calculate how much of a given security is available to sell before the sell order is approved. I’d been on my project for less than a year when I was asked to take ownership of this rather significant feature, so I was intimidated at first.
However, it turned out to be an awesome crash course in both development best practices as well as the financial concepts used to determine what is available to sell. I was able to ask for help from my team when I needed it, and it was ultimately so rewarding to see what a big impact our work could have.
_0.jpg)
