Socure’s mission is to eliminate identity fraud by being the single trusted source for identity verification and fraud prevention in the digital age.
For our customers, it’s not enough to have the best performing machine learning models in the market. They also require the most stable and the most secure platform as well, with no exceptions. That’s where our engineering team steps up— to build the products, data pipeline and internal tools we need to achieve the mission and serve our customers in the best way possible.
To ensure goal alignment, the Socure engineering team has embraced a few principles that promote team excellence and serve as a reminder of how a cohesive team builds the best products.
Competitive externally, collaborative internally
From inception, Socure has had big ambitions. In 2012, we entered a market that had been stale for decades. Our goal was to disrupt the financial services industry by leveraging the latest machine learning technologies and data analytics techniques.
Upon joining the Socure team, employees are encouraged to stay competitive and innovative. At the same time, they are reminded to never bring the fight home. Internally, we are all bound by the same mission irrespective of department, discipline and background. For our engineering team, this means that technical decisions should be made based solely on what will have the best impact on our business. We build products with our customers in mind, remembering that speed should never displace quality. We aim to deliver the most impactful products and processes which will continue to position Socure as thought leaders in the industry.
A global culture, with local autonomy
For a team that is globally distributed in the USA and India, we work hard to prioritize and champion open communication. Our biweekly global engineering all-hands meeting encourages knowledge transfer and enforces our belief that transparency into your peers’ work has a direct correlation with building the strongest version of a product.
“We recognize that we are all working towards the same mission. It’s important for us to agree upon the process and the same principles for design and development. This is how we scale and collaborate easily: we speak the same language and we’re all on the same page.” – Jainik Purohit, Staff Software Engineer (NYC)
Lastly, we realize that coordination across time zones may be challenging. To address this issue, we have adopted the model of a common engineering culture, with local implementation. This means that our entire global team remains aligned on the “bigger picture,” while possessing the autonomy and agility to make decisions locally.
The best idea prevails
We adopt a shared ownership mentality and we do not believe solutions should be dictated in a top-down manner. The team owns the project and the feature, not the individual. Regardless of level or title, all project engineers are involved in decisions that can drive process and design and influence our work-flow.
Whether you are a junior developer or a seasoned engineer, team members are encouraged to contribute to an open exchange of ideas, challenges, and knowledge openly. Engineering managers are vetted for their strong technical backgrounds as well as their ability to facilitate these healthy team discussions. Ultimately, the team selects the most efficient approach no matter the seniority of the person who made the suggestion.
Once requirements are set and a plan is in motion, each engineer is the mastermind behind his/her individual story. Our engineers are valued as individual contributors, and get to see in real time how their piece of the puzzle works and integrates with their peers’ contributions.
“Socure is still a start-up and being in a competitive market, it’s implicit that there is a lot of room for improvement and innovation. You can look forward to building highly available and scalable micro-services and each micro-service will present you with its own challenges like choosing the right storage layer, integrating with another service, or completely rethinking the way we approach the problem.” – James Anto, Staff Software Engineer (Chennai)
Thank you to the Socureans who contributed to this blog post, and a special thank you to Socure Head of Engineering Alex Agular, for co-authoring this post!
Sean joined Socure as a recruiting partner to technical leadership in Engineering, Data Science, and DevOps, and has helped Socure to triple their employee headcount over the past 18 months. In her free time, Sean enjoys spending time outdoors (hiking, kayaking, running), reading and convincing people that instant coffee is a legitimate source of caffeine.
Socure is the leading platform for digital identity verification and trust.
Its predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine learning technology with trusted online/offline data intelligence from email, phone address, IP, device, velocity, and the broader internet to verify identities in real time.
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