They’re a familiar sight on the Charles — teams of rowers cutting swiftly down the river in shells and sculls. Whether in pairs, fours or eights, the athletes move in sync to find their stroke rhythm. And come regattas, that coordination can become the deciding factor between a win and a loss.
Ambitious and integrated teams are just as important for the Boston tech companies hiring now as they are on the water. Tech leaders at three local companies all cite collaboration as one of the central competencies they seek in candidates for their open roles.
“Teamwork needs to be extremely strong to successfully collaborate in a work setting,” said Vidya Sambasivan, director of engineering at Wellframe. “Our diverse engineering teams work together across time zones, while delivering our product in a high-performing team environment.”
April Carter, director of engineering at PathAI, is proud of how her team has retained their core culture even as the company grows. “It’s not the same feeling with two larger teams of developers as it was with the original team of five when I started, but the collaborative aspect of our team culture hasn’t changed,” she said.
Mike Callahan, director of digital delivery at Dawn Foods, agreed that strong collaboration requires an ongoing commitment to honing team habits. “Our tech team is constantly working in a collaborative mode to deliver new capabilities and enhance existing ones,” he said.
Built In Boston heard more from Sambasivan, Carter and Callahan about their team cultures as they search for curious, action-oriented and enthusiastic engineers, analysts and scientists.
PathAI helps pathologists diagnose and treat diseases through artificial intelligence and deep machine learning.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
The ability to determine what is absolutely-required functionality and what is nice-to-have can really help a software engineer’s productivity in a fast-moving team. This can make the difference between spending weeks or months adding scope that may not be used or wrapping up the task at hand and moving on. It’s important to make these judgements correctly — otherwise you risk implementing a feature that doesn’t work for users.
How should engineers determine which items are core requirements and which they might push back on implementing or recommend deferring? This requires a contextual understanding of how the feature fits into the product and how it might be used. Engineers need to ask questions of each other and of product managers as well as stakeholders from other teams to build this understanding, so an environment that supports asking questions is key. New engineers may start with the desire to implement features perfectly. To acquire an incremental-development mindset and focus on what items are most important for the current use case, engineers need experience asking, “What is really required?” and “Why do we need that feature to make this work?”
An environment that supports asking questions is key.”
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?
In 2022, my team and PathAI as a whole were focused on enabling clinical trials for chronic diseases such as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). PathAI works with biopharmaceutical partners in order to help bring therapies to patients with NASH. Use of our AIM-NASH machine learning algorithm for research can improve reproducibility of results and help to measure drug activity and identify optimal dosage. My team has implemented the AIM-NASH algorithm within a complex pathologist review workflow, and also adapted the workflow for trials using pathologist manual reads, such as digital pathology reads in the absence of an algorithm.
In 2023, we will be taking on several new disease areas using newly-developed machine learning algorithms. Each of these algorithms will require custom features to support the pathologist workflow process and associated scoring and assessment. We’ll use our flexible workflow engine to build new pathologist review steps for consensus and adjudication processes. We are also building a calculation engine that can auto-compute specific combinations of results across multiple slides processed by the algorithm on a per-trial basis.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word?
My team at PathAI is the most collaborative team I’ve ever worked with! That was the first thing I noticed when I started work here, fully remote at the beginning of the pandemic, and it is still true today. Each member of the team is genuinely eager to help other team members learn, whether it’s by getting on a call, writing or reviewing a technical design document, presenting problems or discussing options at a team meeting or deciding to work together on a particular project. It’s been really amazing to watch this collaborative approach extend to new people on the team and to see them pick it up and become part of it. Team members make the effort daily to work together and help each other regardless of their location or their schedule.
Wellframe’s comprehensive suite includes digital health management solutions for care management, advocacy and navigation.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Leadership is one character trait that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on my engineering team. I like to think that all engineers on my team are CEOs of their technical deliverables and should act as owners of their areas. In order for my team to be high performing and successful, every engineer on my team has the skills and confidence to make decisions and lead their area of work. Be it technical design or resolving a production issue, my team does not need to wait to be told to take action but instead are given the opportunity and freedom to act as leaders in their everyday work. Any new engineer who joins the team is also expected to be a leader on my team.
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 biggest project for my technical teams in 2023 is to build the next generation of the Wellframe platform that integrates with our subsidiaries, customers and third-party platforms. This project is interesting, challenging and fun as we aim to build a scalable cloud-native microservices platform to enable these integrations. These integrations will move us closer to our mission of putting members first and enabling members to feel supported by the healthcare they receive. Through the API-first innovative platform we are building, we hope to establish a strong relationship between the health plans and members, which in turn improves the support and care for every member of our platform.
Any new engineer who joins the team is also expected to be a leader on my team.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word?
Collaborative. My team members understand each other in their day-to-day setting and work collaboratively toward Wellframe’s mission. We are an inclusive organization, and we encourage our teams to bring their real selves into the workplace. Diversity is encouraged, and we try to instill that in our hiring process. During the interview process, we pair up with the candidates to solve a technical problem together. This gives both the candidates and the Wellframe team an opportunity to understand what it means to work collaboratively together at Wellframe.
Dawn Foods has been manufacturing bakery and distributing ingredients for more than a century, and their digital innovation hub is driving their future work forward.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Curiosity. Are you curious about the world around you? Curious about the tools that enable us to live the way we do, especially using the internet? Curious about how those are created? Curious to learn? If you cannot wait to dig into something new that might help make things easier, we are looking for you. We also value diverse experiences and new points of view that add to those we already have on our team.
There are additions we plan to add in 2023 to make our customers’ lives just a touch sweeter.”
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 exciting additions we plan to add in 2023 to make our customers’ lives easier and just a touch sweeter. Enabling them to run their businesses more efficiently so they can get back to doing what they do best — baking sweet creations that put a smile on their consumers’ faces. Our “Voice of Customer” program identifies potential new features as well as usability improvements. In parallel, our business partners are creating new Dawn capabilities that we look to enable on the site. The coming months will see an extensive integration of our insights and recipes with e-commerce using a headless CMS, making account management easier with payment gateway integration, exciting user interface updates and more.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word?
Collaborative. Our tech team is constantly working in a collaborative mode with the product, SRE, marketing and vendor partner teams to deliver new capabilities and enhance existing ones. As a high-performing team, the tech group is always looking at new ideas and how to bring them to our customers.
