What It's Like to Work at Garner Health

Describe the key factors or strategies that helped you land your dream job in the tech industry. 

Ownership and growth opportunities were at the top of my list. It was really important to me, when searching for my next role, that I found a place that enabled engineers to be owners of the product they’re building, the process of how they build it and the culture of the team surrounding them.

When I was interviewing, I was looking for leadership that enabled their employees to take chances and learn new things.

I knew I found it in Garner when talking with our CEO and head of engineering. Garner had set out to achieve a bold goal, and they knew they needed a strong team to do so. The intention and care that was put into building the team to succeed strongly resonated with me, there was a heavy emphasis on taking pride in the work you’re spending your time on.

What specific skills or experiences do you believe set you apart from other candidates during your job search?

I believe being an engineer with a broad skill set and flexible attitude is the key to success at an early stage company. The more flexible you are the more problems you are going to be able to handle and the more valuable you are going to be. That doesn’t mean always knowing the answers, but rather being willing to push yourself into new areas and figure it out along the way.

The best engineers I have worked with are not above any problem and don’t shy away from challenges in a domain they aren’t familiar with. They are relentless in their approach, making data-driven decisions and not relying on hunches or guesses without facts to back them up. I’ve taken inspiration from these people and it has served me well, especially when I’m working on something I’m less familiar with. I always encourage engineers to embrace opportunities to learn a new language, pattern or tool because the larger your toolkit is the wider problem space you’ll be able to apply yourself to.

How has your dream job lived up to your expectations? What are the types of projects you’re working on and what makes you most excited to come to work each day?

The ownership and autonomy I’ve had at Garner has surpassed my expectations. Early in my time here, we had an emerging need in a problem space well outside of my responsibilities at the time. I had a few conversations with our head of engineering and shared my ideas. The response was to let me shift my focus onto those problems to work with a few other engineers, propose and ultimately build the solution. I was surprised by how quickly I became a key piece of solving one of the biggest challenges facing the company and learned an incredible amount along the way.

Three and a half years into my time at Garner, I’m still excited for the variety of problems I get to work on. Lately, I’ve been focusing on improving our member experience around searching for providers. We have a long way to go, but have made huge improvements in the last few months thanks to the amazing team I get to work with.

Now that our team has grown, I’m stepping into a management role and I’m very excited to support other engineers on the team to develop their skills, make an impact on our product and achieve their goals. This brings a whole new set of challenges which will again give me a new area to grow into.