This QRA team is really quite special
Originally posted in LinkedIn.
When I give talks about our company and our work, I invariably mention how proud I am of my team, but I rarely get a chance to actually tell people why I’m proud of them and who they actually are. Since QRA is looking to hire at least one developer, now is a good time to tell the world a little about our team.
I’ve been fortunate that the group we collectively gathered at QRA is really quite special. I’m not sure we can keep up this phenomenal track record of hiring, but I do know that we will always keep trying. Indulge me and let be brag a bit:
- Our CTO and my cofounder cut his teeth at a number of startups in Vancouver. Later, at Microsoft, Dean was part of the visionary Scripting Guys, doing webcasts before webcasts were a thing. He’s particularly proud of the team bringing down MS’s webcasting infrastructure because of demand. Fun times. Dean also worked for BlackBerry, in a small prototyping group creating forward thinking applications for smartphones.
- If Dean is our master architect — and he is — then our COO is our master strategist. Alex has led strategic alliances for both global telecom firms with valuations up in the billions, and for cutting-edge startups helping bring their products to market. He’s exited and acquired multiple companies and has helped armloads of start-ups. The latest, and from which he came to us, was Thalamic Labs from Waterloo. Man did we luck out.
- Our most senior developer is Ken Duck. He’s been on the founding team of multiple startups, some which have exited. He can code faster than I can type gibberish on my keyboard. Seriously, he can code for 72 hours straight without blinking.
- Doug Staple Leads our engine development. He recently broke the world record for evaluating the prime counting function. What’s even more spectacular, Doug did this in his “spare time,” as part of his Master Degree, in Mathematics, while contributing full-time at QRA, and with three degrees in Physics already under his belt. LOL. He’s hilariously competent and productive.
- Our director of business development has a PhD in quantum dynamics. (Yes, that’s a thing.) It’s great watching Eduardo with engineers at trade shows, first following them down a rabbit hole, and then leading them even deeper, down into the deepest technical details, all the way down to the electrons. Eduardo is also an accomplished musician, and has even played onstage with Peter Gabriel. Really, I’m not making this up.
- Our middleware was built by a Philosopher with super mad skills. Alex can opine on demand, indefinitely, and simultaneously, on Java Tomcat, DevOps, and Ludwig Wittgenstein — he’s a fan of all three. And he’s a fantastic brewer; in fact he is the secret behind our patented and exclusive Black IPA, QBrew!
- Oh yeah, and our latest hire, David Wolfe, was at Berkeley for years, and came to us from Google Zürich. So good.
The list really goes on and on — our finance manager is actually an editor, our coop student may well be our best application engineer — and I really can sing their praises without stop. This, the people, is why I think QRA is so great. We are working together to solve a problem that is costing the world’s largest defence and aerospace companies almost $100Bn annually. Everyone agrees it’s a problem, but no one knows how to implement a workable solution. I think the tools we have developed push us towards a solution.
We are looking for more developers and engineers. Someone able to contribute to an intense, high-performing team. I’m happy to say that everyone on our team can do something that no one else can. We are looking for others to round us out and to helps us build a product that can change the way complex engineered systems are specified, designed, and built. And we’ll have great fun doing it. Come talk to us and see if you are a fit.
