Meet Sana Farrukh, software engineer extraordinaire and a member of our mighty Boston team. (Aside: the team is looking to grow!) Here Sana shares about her background, what drew her to Metromile, and why she likes holding down our fort on the east coast.
Tell us a little bit about your background.
I am originally from Lahore, Pakistan. Back in 2015, I came to Boston for grad school and graduated from Tufts. My area of expertise is in computer networks, more specifically internal data center networks.
What interested you about Metromile?
There were a few things that compelled me to explore and advance my career with Metromile:
- The vast variety of interesting projects that Metromile offered based on the collected telematics data really spiked my interest. This is still a relatively new field, so there still is plenty of opportunity to explore even more interesting projects.
- It offered an entirely different domain, compared to what I had experience with, in academia. So I wanted to move into something different.
- As a small company with new, budding projects, Metromile offers the opportunity to work on projects from start to launch, not to be pigeon holed on one product or discipline. That means, too, that all my contributions are meaningful.
And now that I am here, it is also the people I work with and the amazing teams I’m part of, that makes me want to come in everyday.
As a software engineer, where specifically is your work focused right now?
So far I have been lucky enough to work on a few different projects: customer outreach, our analysis of driving behavior, mobile telematics integration (that is, syncing customers’ phones with their driving data). At present, my work is focused on making the new customer experience the very best possible one. This means ensuring that the customer receives consistent and coherent communication from us in their first few weeks and that their experience with the Pulse device is seamless.
Boston is a smaller office than our San Francisco and Tempe locations. Plusses and minuses?
Boston is indeed a small team, which is one of the things I love about our office.
It is relatively quiet, which works best for me as I like to work in quiet environments. And being three hours ahead of San Francisco, we start early and get adequate time to work continuously before afternoon meetings start.
Being a small team, everyone knows everyone. We often find ourselves taking a deeper dive into discussions about current teams, projects, interests both within and outside of work, vacation plans, pets, etc. Impromptu lunches often gather the whole office on one table — you can’t do that in a big office.
With everyone sitting close to everyone else, it is often effortless to seek guidance and help on tasks we need a second opinion on. Despite our size, we still have a good mix of folks from different teams, so we’re able to apply diverse expertise to problems.
What kind of person would you suggest consider working at Metromile?
Metromile is more than just an insurance company. It offers a unique combination of IoT, engineering, research, and, yes, insurance. Anyone who is interested in the intersection of those things should definitely look into Metromile.