Hi, my name is Christopher Gervais. I'm the CTO at Ready Education, running product and engineering here. I've been the CTO at several Boston high growth companies over the past few years, including Caris and prestack. And it's great to get the chance to talk to you.
About Ready Education and what they do
Ready Education is a student engagement and communication platform. So we're serving higher ed customers across the globe. Today, we got 700 customers in 27 countries, and we're serving over 7 million students. And we're helping those students better navigate college life, whether it's everything from understanding what courses and classes, they need to take where they need to go, but more importantly, really connecting to their campus and to other folks on campus getting the support they need and the connections they need with each other.
Details on the tech stack
Our tech stack is actually pretty cool here at ready, we're a mobile first company. So the primary way that the student engages with their university or college is going to be through the ready app. And it's pretty cool because we've actually made a white labeled system. So we don't publish the app, and nobody comes to ready, our job is not to have our brand to be part of the experience with the students. We've got a core iOS and Android app. And what we do is we have tools that our customers can use to brand it, add their own content, and then push that out through their own account through the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. And so we really start with a mobile first experience. And then from there, we have an entire stack underneath that. That as you can imagine, is filled with API's, integrations, analytics, and other things in the back end that allow us to deliver that great experience. Another big part of it is that we integrate with a lot of different systems. So one of the interesting areas that we focus on is higher ed is like up some other industries through the pandemic really celebrated their digital transformation. And so there was a lot of point solutions in place, very hard for students to see all that in one place. They don't want to go log in a 10 year old portals that looked like they were from, you know, from the last century, right? They want all this information right on their right on their phone. And that's what we do. We bring all this together, we virtualized access to all these different information about courses, and student life and community, the ability to get help and assistance when they need it. Even information about their financial, financial aid, or enrollment status, bring all that together. And so, from a tech stack perspective, were all based on AWS. We're largely using Python and Java on the back end. Our web, the web tools we have are built with Angular, and our mobile apps are native first. So today, they are a native iOS and native Android app built in Swift, and built in Kotlin.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
So there's a few really, really fun things that the team gets to work on. And of course, the thing we're most focused on is the capabilities that are going to make students successful, right, that's ultimately at the core of what we do. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, there's some, there are some really interesting challenges, like how we integrate with these different systems, and can pull all of this data into one golden record for that student that can be used to that, that throughout their entire journey with the, you know, with their university, or college, or even if they switch, you know, the other area is that as we think about what we what we've built to serve the mobile apps, we're continuing to build out API's that our customers and partners can use, there's a lot of really interesting sort of business scenarios we're looking at to expand the different types of support students can get. So a really big thing today is, after college, how to get students connected and in the workplace. Well, if we've got the right platform, for other partners to connect into, we can help make that journey. Pretty easy. And then I think one of the other areas that honestly we're really just getting started in is really run all the data and, you know, we're never looking at our data to monetize it, or, you know, we keep our students data private. But there is a lot of information in there that we can use to help with interventions. So understanding of certain populations of students aren't doing that well, and how can we help the college or the university reach them better digitally, given that today, you know, everyone coming back to campus, especially right now, it's back to school season here as we're filming this? Some students are entering the college experience for the first time coming off of a pretty traumatic experience in the pandemic. And knowing how to get those folks the right help is really important. And that's a big part of what we do with intervention and assessments in side of our solution. So engineers gonna be able to work on quite a range of opportunities and challenges and, you know, really great problems from user experience to continuing to make the app as performant as possible, integrating with a lot of different systems, looking at our how we evolve our architecture as we've just hotkey, Stichting growth. And then how we connect to all these different systems and leverage that data is is a lot of fun, because we're we are not only with the market leader here, but our customers are looking at us for leadership. And we have some great ability, I think, to provide that to them.
How the engineering team works together
So overall, what's I think, really interesting about where we are today, and the growth of our team is that engineers coming in are going to have quite a bit of agency to continue to help us evolve our process, right. It's not like, we have no process today. But like every great team, we're in search of that, you know, it's asymptotic, we're always trying to work towards an iterate towards that, that better, the better way we can work together, the better way to collaborate. One of the interesting things about ready is, as an engineer and this team, you're going to have colleagues across the globe, right, so we have got folks in Canada, in the US and various time zones, and in Europe. And so part of our process isn't just how we work on our code, it's how we work with each other, and continuing to really refine the ways we can collaborate asynchronously and synchronously. But I think you're gonna find as an engineer here, you know, fairly standard process, which is actually great, it's easy to get started, right, we're kind of doing two weeks brands, we're shipping continuously, we're using all the kind of tools that you would expect a modern team to use, but we're always looking to improve. So I think engineers who come in, are gonna get a chance to work on, you know, three products, you know, the product we sell to our customer, our team is a product, and it's got to have a roadmap and features and bugs, and our processes and product. And we're investing in all three of those. So coming in as an engineer means you're actually going to get to work on all three, which hopefully we think is kind of fun.
What to expect during the interview process
So if you're interested in joining ready, we've got a bunch of, we've got a bunch of roles open due to our growth, here's what you can expect in our interview process. You know, first of all, the process is built around respect, right, we know that interviewing takes time. And it can sometimes be a nerve-racking experience. So we really seek to make it as easy as possible, you know, we are going to look to make sure that as you're coming in and thinking about the different roles, and you're going to be a native app developer or a front end developer, you want to work on back end API's data, you know, we are going to drill into what you've done and skills, it but it's really going to be mostly about conversation. So you'll meet folks on the prospective team that you're going to be working on individual engineers, as well as team leads, you'll meet with our VP of Engineering for analysis, terrific, I'll get involved, hopefully, we get a chance to meet you if you're interested in the process. But the goal here isn't, is for you to be asking as many questions about us as we would have you. And so we really try and make this experience as interesting as possible. And also as valuable as possible. We try not to you know, it's a very fairly quick process, we try and keep the interview, the interview, the number of people in the interviews, I won't say to a minimum, because we want you to get a good feel for folks at the company. But we're also not going to overburden you with meeting with 1000 people before you decide maybe this is a great place for you to come. So we hope you if you do decide to join us and want to go through the process, you enjoy it, we also want feedback on it. Because every person who's gone through it gives us feedback and we iterate on it based on that.
About Ready Education's culture
So working at ready is, for me has been just a terrific experience, you know, for a couple of reasons. One of which is our CEO kind of comes from a different lineage than some others. He comes from a Chief People Officer background. So you can really imagine that culture, the way we operate as humans together, the way our management philosophy is built around how to assist our folks to do the best they can. And so from a culture perspective, you're gonna find, you know, tremendous amount of openness. Certainly, I think that's just to be expected everywhere. We are distributed global team. And so I think from a cultural perspective, you find a lot of folks who are very willing to help each other knowing that sometimes, you know, you're not seeing each other face to face, you're not it's actually not convenient, even because of time difference to have a zoom. So you see, you know, a lot of just built in respect and a lot of respect for people's time and boundaries given that, but also folks where they need to go in the extra mile to help each other. We certainly have a culture internally of recognition and support. One of my favorite channels is the recognition channel on Slack. And not because it's rah rah but because it is focused on showing that in every pocket of the company, there's great work happening, and that folks are recognizing it, that they're seeing it, from the smallest things to the biggest things from someone who just joined us to someone who's been here, you know, the longest, it kind of doesn't matter. And that's one of the things I really enjoyed kind of coming in from a culture perspective that really resonated with me was this really focus on recognition, not to just talk about all the things that go well, but actually, we've created an environment where we can talk about the things that haven't gone, well, reflect on them learn, and then do better. And that's one of our core values.
They are hiring
So we're definitely building out our team here at readying and continuing to add to our teams globally. So you know, in the US, we are remote and distributed here, although we're bringing folks together, you know, where we can, we've got folks clustered in different localities. So we're taking the opportunity to bring folks together. If you're interested in joining one of our European teams, we've got offices in Liverpool, Paris, and in Utrecht in the Netherlands. And there, we have a hybrid strategy. So if you want to come into the office for a few days a week, we've got space for you. Again, if you want to come on a different schedule, you could do that as well. But it's really exciting for us to have these different types of offices and these different types of opportunities. Because as technologists, you know, as an engineer, in theory, you can kind of work from anywhere, because the tools allow you to do that. And that's been something that's been really fun for us as we've been growing the team finding folks who have said, You know what, working fully remotes really comfortable for me or in other regions, I want to come in a few days a week, and we've got options for you to do that.
Why now is the ideal time to join
So it's a great time to join ready for a few reasons. It's some of the reasons for which I joined, is, that I really appreciate the mission of the company. And so again, everyone gets you know, it's, it's great to be an engineer, you can have a lot of options about where you want to spend your time. For me, it's always been around, where can I spend my time to help others and we're certainly trying to help others here with students. It is a growing market, we last year expanded into Europe. And that's a really great growth opportunity for us. We have a great growth opportunity continuing in North America and Central America as well. So I think one of you know, one of the reasons it's great to join ready right now is that we are growing, we're continuing to grow even through you know, the current macroeconomic cycle, we are still investing in growth responsibly and properly, I would say we're a very well run company. And so from a risk perspective, I feel like ready has de-risked what it means to join a high growth company. At the same time, there are all the opportunities that come with a high growth company for learning, for doing things at scale, but mostly for making an impact. And I think as we see the world just like others, other industries, the world of higher ed, rapidly adopting to far more digital enablement. It's made, what ready does even more important, and that's been a big driver of our growth. And so we're very excited about where we are today and where we're going. And we think that now couldn't be a better time to join ready. So we hope you do
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