On an engineering team, I’m the person who asks a lot of questions.
Why are we doing this? How are we going to get there? Who is doing what?
To some, this line of questioning can be aggravating. But over the years, I’ve learned to lean into it.
Because by asking those questions, I’ve:
- Built sustainable products that support hundreds of thousands of users
- Helped my team understand how their day-to-day fits into that big picture
- Assigned developers to tasks they actually want to work on
- Learned what it takes for companies to go public
- Understood what direct reports need from me
As I embark on my newest chapter, I’m taking a moment to reflect on where I’ve been and what I plan to bring to the table as the Director of Engineering at Kard.
An early start in adtech
I got my Bachelor’s in Computer Science, and after working for some time in India, I decided to continue on the software engineering learning path by going to grad school. I moved to the U.S. to pursue a Master’s Degree, where I found that I truly, really enjoyed application development.
Earlier in my career, I joined a startup called Jumptap as a software engineer. Jumptap served ads on mobile games like Angry Birds. At the time when mobile devices were fairly new, the adtech world related to them was fairly new, too. How would we handle so many requests from so many types of devices? How do we, in a split second, respond to win a spot in a highly competitive ad tech world? As you can imagine, I learned a ton about designing distributed systems for scale.
A few years later, and after a few acquisitions, we became part of AOL Advertising. By then, I’d grown from my individual contributor role to a management position, leading full-stack, geographically distributed teams. Part of that transition was learning not only to understand what we were doing and why we were doing it that way but to explain that direction to the rest of my team. I also got a taste of other parts of managing teams — hiring, resource planning, and performance management.
I was itching to grow even more as a leader when AOL had to make some tough layoffs. Fortunately, it came at an opportune time, right after my first child was born. I spent six months with my baby, then started looking for my next challenge.
Making my mark at Toast
I jumped back into the workforce at Toast, which was then a Series C startup building a point-of-sale system for restaurants.
My team was just seven people, and we owned the entire credit card processing platform for Toast — a big (and high-stakes) task for our tiny but mighty team. Looking back, that role really skyrocketed me to a level of influence I hadn’t had before, and I knew I had to wield that power responsibly. In addition to building architecture to scale, I looked for all the opportunities we could get to spend more time building out the payments platform and less time supporting it.
We took scaling operationally very seriously, creating tooling, adding automation, fixing bugs to give us time back, and adding safeguards to keep our customers’s businesses going without fear of bringing the system down. We refined our hiring practices and built onboarding modules and programs for our growing team.
Over time, I realized that prioritizing and fostering cross-functional relationships became a natural part of my responsibilities as my role increased in scope. Such relationships helped me build influence and connect what my team did to Toast’s broader strategy. It was all very exciting, learning what it means to be a senior leader.
In the six years that I worked at Toast, the company went from serving 6,000 customers to 100K+ customers, and the Fintech engineering team’s size exploded by more than 10x along the way. I was proud to be a part of the engineering leadership team that helped the company scale such heights.
Being a leader in a public company
Toast went public in 2021, bringing even more sense of responsibility in being the “money” team. And it came with more scrutiny and different types of compliance. Again, we had to redefine the way we operated and built products.
In February of this year, my journey with Toast ended with a layoff. I took this as a sign to take a break to rest, spend time with my family, focus on my fitness, and decide where I wanted to go next.
A stellar team and a product with limitless potential
Before I knew it, I was ready for my next adventure. As I looked back to look ahead, I knew I was looking for a few specific things to continue on my journey of growth and satisfaction. I wanted:
- a fast-growing company
- a product I understood and believed in
- to work with good people who were also passionate and smart
And then I heard about Kard.
Everyone knows one of the top factors in people staying at any job is the people they work with. For me, too, working with good, smart, passionate people was one of the top things I was looking for in my next role.
After getting to know Gary Poster, Kard’s VP of Product & Engineering, hearing about his approach to leadership, product, and engineering, and how he thinks about the kind of problems that Kard is solving, I became very curious to learn more.
As I met more people at Kard and heard what problems they were working on and how they were going about it, I could imagine myself being a part of their team. Kard’s engineers had been able to accomplish a lot with their small team. With their work, I could see that they were preparing to scale Kard in many dimensions, including architectural and operational scale.
Kard has access to so much valuable data — data that can eliminate the guesswork of most adtech projects. And it’s already differentiated from other CLO products on the market with always-on offers. Everyone at Kard believed in the power of these advantages. All of these things made me want to be a part of that team!
Trust and psychological safety
I’ve only been a part of the Kard team for a few weeks, and I’m really happy to be here.
An important part of my job involves giving engineers a birds-eye view of where we are and where we’re going and helping them understand what they’re building, for whom, and why. This context helps me and them as we work together to create opportunities they need to continue feeding their flame of ambition.
My job is also to create space for them to fail fast and “safely.” When you try new things, it’s impossible not to make mistakes — and those experiences help us grow. Building that trust between me and my team will be one of the most critical tasks in the coming months as we lay the foundation for growth.
Follow along on our journey as Kard’s engineers continue to drive innovation in the CLO space.
Bonus round: Pooja’s obsessions
My kids. They’re four and seven. During my short sabbatical, I took them around the country to visit family and friends. We went to trampoline parks, volunteered, and went camping — we spent lots of quality time together. It is hard to believe that my oldest is taking the bus to school this year.
We are also doing a major house remodel, and over the last six months, I’ve learned so much about construction codes, kitchen cabinet suppliers, hot roofs, and why to pick this faucet over that one.
Outside of that, I recently visited the Art Institute in Chicago, and it inspired me to go back to using acrylics. I’ve dabbled in painting for a while, but, of late, I’ve only been using watercolors. I do want to dabble in oil painting, but I don’t know if I have the mental and physical capacity at the moment.