Starting a new year from scratch is an opportune time to set attainable goals, and resolutions like career advancement, healthier habits and daily reading time are common additions to vision boards and agendas. But individuals aren’t the only ones setting deadlines to achieve a brighter future.
Companies set New Year’s resolutions, too, and the LA tech scene has big plans on the horizon — including hiring ambitious new talent to kick off 2023.
In fact, while many industries enter a period of dormancy as we trickle into the new year, technology employment has continued to hold steady while unemployment rates drop to 1.8 percent, according to a January report by CompTIA.
At Thrive Market, for example, data analysts and data engineers are on a continuous mission to create a best-in-breed data platform, and have bold ideas in motion to raise the bar on data observability and data management in 2023.
“Our current ambitions are to enable data observability including data lineage — the task of understanding how data assets are connected across the data stack,” said Director of Data Analytics and Engineering Jay Tomkins. “We are here to start a cultural revolution that disseminates into data democratization, so we need individuals who are not afraid to ask hard questions and can adapt quickly.”
Tech experts at Ylopo also have big projects in motion for the new year driven by data, and are focused on helping their customers optimize sales performance at scale. To CTO Christopher Soto, that means frequently checking in and updating the company’s innovative tech stack to forge solid foundations for future products.
“Due to the rapidly changing market landscape of our industry, it’s very important for us to do what we can to make our engineers more nimble so that we can respond rapidly to changes in market forces,” Soto said.
And for the job seekers hungry to make an impact within an organization directly after signing on, The Aerospace Corporation not only recognizes that ambition, but encourages it.
“New hires can expect to immediately start making critical contributions to projects and to interface directly with project leaders and customers,” said Engineering Manager Caroline Jones. “Our technical areas have a high demand for talent, and we anticipate that this demand signal will only grow — providing opportunities for new hires to become trusted subject matter experts.”
While every company’s goals are unique, the foundation is frequently the same — rooted in positive change and consistent growth. That’s why Built In L.A. sat down with Soto, Tomkins and Jones to learn more about their biggest upcoming projects and the ideal tech candidates they’re looking to hire in order to transform resolutions into reality.
The Aerospace Corporation is a nonprofit leader in federally funded research and development.
What are the biggest projects your tech team has planned in 2023?
In 2023, the data platforms and architectures team will focus on building distributed and open data architectures for our customers. This includes developing cloud-native applications and microservices, modernizing data platforms and applications for enterprise-scale, building intelligent data stores and pipelines, and building self-adaptive data platforms which can monitor and adjust itself, its environment, and the surrounding ecosystem.
Describe the career growth opportunities associated with these projects that await new hires.
To support onboarding and continue providing The Aerospace Corporation and its customers with knowledge and skills on cutting-edge tools and technologies, we highly encourage continuous learning and provide opportunities for training and mentoring. We invest in professional growth and career advancement depending on the engineer’s interest in pursuing management or technical development career paths.
New hires can expect to immediately start making critical contributions to projects and to interface directly with project leaders and customers.”
What qualities and skill sets do you look for in a new tech hire?
The most important quality we look for in a new tech hire is the willingness and drive to learn new tools and technologies continuously. As a team, we provide value to our customers via our expertise in the latest and greatest tools and technologies to improve their current processes and prepare for the future. To do so, our team needs to always be on top of the latest innovations and have a forward-thinking mindset.
The skill set we look for in a new hire is a solid programming foundation — either from a computer science/engineering educational background or a STEM background with proven computer science/engineering experience. We are looking for Java and Python programmers — other languages such as C, C++ and Go are also a plus — who have experience with modern software development practices and databases.
Additional beneficial skill sets are: experience creating cloud-native applications, data ontology expertise, ability to create APIs, knowledge of time series and graph databases, ontology, and experience with deploying to cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure.
Thrive Market is an online membership-based market that delivers high quality, healthy and sustainable products at members-only prices.
What are the biggest projects your tech team has planned in 2023?
Our current team includes seasoned data analysts and data engineers that are on a mission to create the best-in-breed data platform that powers every business decision made at Thrive Market. At any point of time, we have tens of A|B tests that are running across our client-facing apps on desktop, iOS and Android — and data from these tests are used to guide the direction and opportunities that drive the future roadmap of projects to provide an amazing experience to our 1.2 million members.
We have come a long way in our data journey at Thrive Market, and have mastered the collect-analyze-repeat model when it comes to having reliable data at our fingertips with dashboards and tools. However, one of the central tenets in using data effectively is to have a stellar observability, which comprises having superior data quality and monitoring framework. There’s no bigger investment in 2023 than raising the bar on data observability and data management: data quality, master data and data governance.
Describe the career growth opportunities associated with these projects that await new hires.
Thrive Market is a fast-paced growth-stage startup, where we pride ourselves in moving fast and innovating. We measure our impact in terms of the lasting value that we build for our members and for Thrive Market as a company, and never sacrifice long-term value for short-term gain.
The data engineering and analytics team believes in turning insights gleaned from data into concrete actions, and smashing through problems like a juggernaut. Data powers everything we do at Thrive Market, and the data analysts and engineers form strong partnerships with stakeholders who benefit from our data insights in making smarter business decision-making. This culture of thinking big and being tenacious in our pursuit of excellence provides amazing career growth opportunities to those who want to go above and beyond and get a holistic view of our business — whether you are a marketing analyst or a finance analyst.
The data engineering and analytics team believes in turning insights gleaned from data into concrete actions, and smashing through problems like a juggernaut.”
What qualities and skill sets do you look for in a new tech hire?
Every new hire at Thrive Market embodies our core values: tenacity, authenticity, thinking big and being member-first. For a tech hire, we look for all these values and in addition, we need the hard skills, the drive and the passion to innovate, create and succeed. The data engineering and analytics team goes beyond creating charts and dashboards, strives to influence better conclusions by delivering analysis with every information, and provides actionable results and recommendations to drive business opportunities.
We look for team players who are curious, and embody a strong ownership mentality to drive and deliver impact. Our motto in the team is simple: Embrace excellence, embrace change and embrace data.
Ylopo provides digital marketing powered by big data and AI for real estate agents and teams across the U.S.
What are the biggest projects your tech team has planned in 2023?
We have several large projects slated for 2023 — one of which is a new analytics product which helps our customers optimize sales performance at scale. However, we are equally excited about those geared towards improving both the developer and employee experience. That’s why it is imperative that we create efficiencies for our internal employees, especially for our customer success and onboarding teams.
Describe the career growth opportunities associated with these projects that await new hires.
Part of improving the engineering experience is modernizing our technology stack where and when we can. For example, we are constantly exploring new database technologies to make parts of our data services more purpose built and performant. We have also kicked off a project to migrate our front end apps to Next.js in order to take advantage of the many performance enhancements this will provide. This will also provide a more solid foundation for the next generation of products we will build and offer to our customers.
Experience and expertise are key — but what’s more important to us is whether or not new hires fit into the culture we’ve fostered since the company’s inception.”
What qualities and skill sets do you look for in a new tech hire?
With new tech hires, obviously experience and expertise are key. But what’s more important to us at Ylopo is whether or not they fit into the culture we’ve fostered since the company’s inception. Engineers should not only have a voice and be able to advocate for their opinions, but they should also value helping peers learn from each others’ successes and mistakes. It’s okay to fail as long as we fail fast.
