Meet Andreas Binnewies, Verkada Senior Software Engineer
At a glance
Sub-team within Engineering: Mobile
Date joined Verkada: November 2019
Previous companies: Funny Or Die, Google, Meebo
University: University of California, Santa Cruz
What’s different about working at Verkada?
As a software engineer, I’ve worked at both startups and larger companies, and I think the biggest difference at Verkada is the excitement in the office. We’re young but growing quickly, which makes everybody excited to be here, excited to do the work, and excited to be part of this organization. At the startups I’ve worked at before, there was excitement but there was also a lot of nervousness because there wasn’t as clear direction. And at the big companies, it felt more like people were just kind of coming in and collecting their paychecks. Verkada is different. There are all these things that I want to do and problems I want to solve and products I want to work on, and I’m not alone in feeling this way. There’s a strong internal energy, a real enthusiasm here.
I think the biggest difference at Verkada is the excitement in the office
What’s the hardest problem you recently solved? Who else was involved?
On a recent project, we revamped the history feature built into our mobile app. It was kind of hard to use, so we worked to make it much more intuitive. There were a lot of small problems that needed to be solved, and we tinkered with lots of edge cases to make it really interactive and fun to use. How to build everything was up to me. But as far as developing new ideas for the feature and really visualizing an ideal version, we did that as a team. We came together and asked ourselves, “How should this feature work? “How should the user experience it?”
That’s something I like about problem-solving here — we don’t have a lot of processes built in yet, so you kind of figure things out on the fly. And if you have good ideas, you can work on implementing them as long as you get buy-in from the appropriate people. So if you want to have a real impact and influence how we do things, now’s a great time to get in.
So if you want to have a real impact and influence how we do things, now’s a great time to get in.
Tell me about a big decision you made recently on your own
Going back to that history feature I worked on, I’d say I made every technical decision pretty much on my own. I would check in with other people, but for the most part, I had full autonomy over how the feature should be implemented. You get a lot of ownership over your work here — it’s up to you to make sure you’re using best practices, because at the end of the day you’re going to be the one that has to maintain the code you write. It’s a lot of responsibility, but also it’s nice to have that autonomy. It’s motivating.
I had full autonomy over how the feature should be implemented
Who at Verkada has taken a special interest in your success or development?
I would say Yin, the Engineering Manager for Mobile. He’s taken an interest in our entire team, really. When each of us joined, he asked us, “What is something you want to work on?” and every week we have one-on-ones to check in on how that’s going and see if there are areas where he could help out or improve our experience. For instance, I asked him for help with my soft skills. I feel like I have good experience with the engineering side of things, but I’m terrible at soft skills. I realize how important they are, but I’ve always prioritized being a better engineer over learning how to interact with people in a really good way. So we’ve been working on that, and I can see I’m improving.
Interested in joining the Verkada team?
Check out open roles or email questions to recruiting@verkada.com
