My experience at Qualia has been unique, mainly because I’ve actually been a Qualia employee twice—with a two year gap between stints. I originally started as a Software Engineer in 2016 when the company was just a year old. After working with the team to build our core product for a couple of years, however, I decided I needed a change: I wanted to travel, and I wanted to move back to my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.
I left Qualia and ended up on the road for almost two years. While I traveled the globe, I wanted to ensure my technical skills stayed sharp, so I contracted software engineering work with a couple of startups. By the end of 2019 I was ready to move home and find my next role.
Lucas Hansen, Qualia’s Co-Founder and CTO, reached out around that time and I flew back to San Francisco to visit the Qualia office. It was clear that in the two years I was gone, Qualia had undergone a serious transformation. The company had grown, the product had launched nationwide, and there were new processes in place to streamline operations. I could also see how engineering had developed an even stronger relationship with teams throughout the company such as product and customer success. Qualia was looking less like a small startup and more like a company that had found its place in the industry.
JON ON REJOINING QUALIA
I rejoined Qualia at the start of 2020. After spending my first few months getting up to speed, I now split my time between being an individual contributor and a mentor for others in engineering. I’ve also been fortunate to have worked on some incredible projects, such as helping develop Qualia’s Partner API. This was a huge opportunity, because it was a new product that opened up the company to an entirely new set of customers. Most of our products at that point had been developed for non-technical real estate professionals. With our new API, we are powering transactions for other real estate technology companies like realtor.com® and others who want to build on top of our software.
Getting to own a project like the API is exactly why I decided to come back to Qualia. Everyone in engineering is given an incredible amount of autonomy. We have the freedom to decide everything from requirements to how a product will actually look and feel for our customers. Every engineer gets a chance to flex their product skills. In the years that I did contract work, I knew how to make sense of any project a client passed my way. My time at Qualia had given me great product sense, and I felt like I could always hit the ground running.
In total, I’ve spent nearly three and a half years at Qualia, and I’m excited by all the new opportunities that come with the company’s continued growth. In particular, I look forward to working with the rest of the engineering team at Qualia to continue developing our API and enabling the next wave of PropTech companies.
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