Engineers might never meet a customer. But their work revolves around the client experience.
For Remy Panicker at 98point6, a healthtech company connecting patients and physicians through an app, the client experience revolves around easily receiving a diagnosis and treatment. But engineers use tools that make life easier, too. That adds up to a major impact: 98point6 team members are more efficient and innovative, and users have a better experience.
“I have the opportunity to directly impact both the patient experience and the experience a physician has when delivering quality care,” Panicker said.
Similarly, for Knackshops VP of Engineering Scott Burkhalter, tools like Shopify have helped the engineering team build a scalable platform. As Knackshops grows, those same tools — and new integrations — allow engineers to improve the shopping experience and help customers put together thoughtful gifts.
Built In Seattle spoke further with Panicker and Burkhalter to learn their favorite tech tools, most exciting projects and what makes their teams special.
The best part? Both companies are hiring.
What they do: 98point6 Inc. is a healthtech company that offers private, text-based diagnosis and treatment via a mobile app.
My favorite tech tools: “As the engineering manager for the member experience team, I’m responsible for supporting the squad as we maintain and build new app features that will delight our members. Currently, one of my favorite tech tools is Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM). We are in the process of integrating KMM to share business logic across our Android and iOS app. Our team recently demoed a proof of concept using KMM to build a new feature, which only took a day instead of a couple of weeks. Actualizing the benefits of sharing code across Android and iOS has had a huge impact on our team’s efficiency.”
The most interesting project: “The most interesting part about all of the projects I work on is that I have the opportunity to directly impact both the patient experience and the experience a physician has when delivering quality care. My team and I are constantly brainstorming and launching innovative technical solutions that help us deliver a simple, exceptional platform that works better for everyone. Healthcare is a complex space that demands a lot of unconstrained thinking, but it’s incredibly rewarding as an engineer to be able to see how your features are directly impacting lives.”
Living the core values: “Employees live and breathe 98point6’s core values, which are unique compared to other companies. We use them in our daily conversations, interviews and decision-making processes — we even have Slack emojis designed after all 14 of our core values. Our values are the foundation for how we interact with each other and are incredibly impactful in building the collaborative, inclusive culture that we have at 98point6.”
What they do: Knackshops Inc is a platform that allows users to create meaningful custom gifts.
Favorite tech tools: “We built out a highly-scalable and performant e-commerce marketplace using Shopify as our primary platform, but integrated with our own Node.js microservices on Amazon Web Services to provide custom content and customized capabilities not provided on Shopify itself.
“We’re on a journey as we transform from a retail to a tech company. As I’ve come on board in 2022 and evaluated the current landscape, I see great opportunities for engineering.
“We need continuous integration and continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, automated provisioning of platform resources, serverless microservices, GoLang microservices and event-driven data pipelines via Kinesis to decouple our service ecosystem. To support internal tooling and operations, I want to build a solid data engineering team to take on extracting, transforming and loading data; data warehousing; ad hoc reporting via Tableau or Looker; and more complex enterprise-level reporting to support our business.
“Once we’ve attained some of those goals, we’ll add machine learning and models to give our site intelligent suggestion rivers and recommendation engines to guide customers through product selection as they’re building a Knack gift set.”
The most challenging project: “We’re migrating to Builder.io as our content management system and teaching our front-end team how to leverage Builder for layout, the flexibility of its native platform components and the ability to build and expose our own library of React components for the site team to use to its advantage.
“This initiative is transformative for Knack. It eases task complexity for front-end work due to Builder’s visual layout capabilities, and it allows us to scale the staff enabled to contribute to our site areas, especially in the unauthenticated site experience, marketing landing pages, blogs and more.
“Once that migration is complete, we can begin to engineer React components that render custom site shopping functionality and make those drag-and-drop, configurable elements on the Builder pages, which will expose the properties our site team needs access to. Then we’ll start the journey to extract our site navigation, site framework and non-commerce pages from Shopify and host them outside of Shopify, which will help improve performance, reduce the risk of hitting Shopify rate limits and position Shopify as our headless commerce platform. This is a very exciting time to be an engineer at Knackshops!”
Empowered engineers: “We’re building an empowered team of skilled engineers from the ground up. We have a chance to establish a microservice-oriented, decoupled, event-driven architecture that’ll establish the patterns and practices for our future engineers as we continue on our journey to becoming a solid tech-empowered company.
“If you’re looking for flexibility, autonomy, a team culture, excellent co-workers and a fun working environment, give us a look!”
