Q&A
What does your typical day look like at Instrumental?
I’ll usually kick off the day by checking to see what insights or questions came up in Asia overnight. This may be Slack or email communications, or opening up the Instrumental app if I know a customer is building. I might see that our AI caught a critical defect on technology they were concerned about and want to highlight that to their engineering team. Everyday is a little bit different, but some possible activities that might follow are:
- Opening up a customer’s CAD assembly in NX to strategize on how we’ll image their assembly in various states
- Working with a prospective customer to understand what challenges they’re currently facing on their production line and determining whether Instrumental will be a good fit to solve their problem and, if so, what exactly that implementation will look like.
- Hands-on work in our office lab to test optical parameters, like polarizers and lighting angle, for a tricky-to-image application like carbon fiber or potting compound coverage.
- Discussing the customer impact of a new feature with our product team, based on discussions I’ve had in my current role and my previous experience working on electronics.
- Syncing internally on logistics for an upcoming deploy: That might be relaying which functional test measurements are critical to our Software Integration team or working with our Deploy Specialists to convert the customer’s build matrix to an Instrumental SOP.
The variety keeps things interesting and also ensures I feel accomplished at the end of each day.
Why did you choose Instrumental?
I previously worked as a Product Design Engineer on laptops and tablets and experienced the pain Instrumental solves first hand. I was really excited about the product and helping to bring faster failure analysis to more folks in the industry.
I was also excited about the Solutions Architect role as a chance to expand my skills: not only to be a mechanical engineer, but also to learn more about the business and product side of things in a way that’s only possible in a small company. Then, when I started to meet the team and thought about the prospect of working with these smart and talented people, that really sealed the deal.
Tell us one thing that people may not know about you.
I’ll never pretend to be a good dancer, but I do like to go line dancing on occasion. This hobby resulted in me doing push-ups on the dance floor at my wedding, in step with my closest friends and family.
Since joining Instrumental, what has been your favorite memory working here?
We did a company-wide hackathon last summer. As a mechanical engineer, I’m sure I could’ve sought out a MechE hackathon, but that was something I’d never experienced before. We were split up into cross-functional teams and had two days to come up with a project under an appropriately wide prompt. It was a great opportunity to collaborate with people across the company I hadn’t worked closely with before and also to have a dedicated time to think creatively about solutions to problems we see everyday.
Watching the Instrumental Summer Olympics recap video is also a very fond memory 🙂
What is your favorite Instrumental Slack Channel and why?
I really like “we-play-to-win”. “Play to win” is one of our company values so that’s the channel where you go to call out a teammate who’s been crushing it and let everyone know exactly how they’ve been winning lately. It’s always bringing good news and no one calls themselves out, so it’s fun to see people acknowledge their teammates for going above and beyond.
What do you like most about your job?
I love when I get to see my work come full circle – when I hear a customer explaining how they solved, not only the problem they came to Instrumental to solve, but also unanticipated issues. In one instance, a customer explained that this kind of issue would’ve taken them months to solve without Instrumental. With Instrumental, they solved it in a matter of minutes! When I hear about these customer wins, I know I did a good job leading someone with a real problem to the right solution.
