How long have you worked for Brightspot? What brought you here?
I just hit my five-year anniversary at Brightspot, my first job out of college. What drew me here was how involved the company is in the community. I volunteered a lot in high school and college, and I wanted to land somewhere I could keep doing that instead of leaving it behind once I started working full-time.
Can you tell me more about your role as Senior Software Engineer? What is a typical day like for you?
My role has varied a lot over the years, and that’s one of the best parts about Brightspot: you’re never boxed into a single job description. Early on, I spent most of my time on environment work, building out environments, migrating data between them, and handling integrations back when I was on Brightspot’s out-of-the-box offering, Go. These days I’m working with the Ops team to upgrade clients to our 5.0 release, and building out the new Chrome extension, Brightspot Toolkit, which has been a rewarding project.
My typical day starts with our daily dev stand-up, then a chunk of the morning triaging tickets, tracking down root causes and passing dev analysis to another developer, plus responding to upgrade issues as clients hit them. The work is reactive by nature, so I try to protect a block later in the day for extension work and downtime. No two days look the same, which is part of why I’ve stayed engaged here.
What inspired you to become a software engineer?
There are four kids in my family. My older siblings took computer science in high school with the same teacher, Larry Baker, and all four of us ended up studying it at Virginia Commonwealth University. He had a huge influence on our family. At 15, when I started his class, I wasn’t particularly good at it. He assured me I was capable of becoming a software engineer, and that’s why I stuck with it. Somewhere along the way, the problem-solving itself got me hooked, and that’s what carried me from his class to VCU to doing this for a living.
Is there a particular feature you’ve built or a problem you’ve solved that you are most proud of?
I’m proudest of the Chrome extension I’ve been building for the last year, Brightspot Toolkit. It handles image analysis, accessibility, SEO and GEO checks, and it’s now used by QA engineers, developers and editors across a number of customers, bridging back-end and front-end work.
The sub-feature I’m proudest of is the accessibility checks. It runs a full audit on whatever page you’re on: heading structure, whether links and buttons have accessible names, whether CTA text matches what a screen reader announces, form labels, video captions, controls and more. An editor sees exactly what’s wrong and what to do about it without leaving the page, so accessibility doesn’t become an afterthought or a cleanup project later.
Accessibility is personal for me. My mom is blind, so I’ve seen firsthand what happens when it gets treated as a box to check at the end, or not at all. Putting those issues in front of editors while they still have their hands on the page is probably the most meaningful work I’ve done here.
What traits are most important to making you successful at your job?
Curiosity, mostly: being willing to ask questions and learn things outside my role. At a place like Brightspot, where you’re not boxed into one lane, being comfortable saying “I don’t know that yet, but let me find out” is what lets you move between different kinds of work.
Do you have any piece of advice for college students or those who are starting their careers in software engineering?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and don’t feel dumb doing it. There are no dumb questions. Learn that early, and you’ll be better equipped later to help others asking the same ones.
If you could pick another role to try within Brightspot for one week, which would it be and why?
UX. I’m curious what the process looks like before something reaches me: the sketches, the dead ends, the tradeoffs nobody sees. Accessibility is part of that too. I’d love to see how it shapes the work from the very first sketch.
Besides the people, what is your favorite part about working at Brightspot?
My favorite part is the autonomy, and how early you get it. I’ve had it since day one, more than I expected right out of college. I’ve been here five years, and my work has looked completely different in each stretch: environments and integrations, then upgrades and extensions. I’ve enjoyed the freedom to move around. Nobody told me to build the Toolkit the way I did. It came out of noticing a problem and having room to do something about it, and the company backed the idea and kept encouraging me. That’s what autonomy looks like here.
What are your favorite activities or hobbies to do outside of the office?
Reading, hands down, that’s my number one. I’ve also gotten into gardening this summer. It’s the opposite of everything else I do: you’re outside, and nothing happens fast. You put the work in and wait. But seeing new vegetables come in is way more exciting than it should be.
What is one thing you think people would be surprised to know about you?
I was a henna artist in high school and a bit of college. I took henna classes every year when I visited Pakistan, and got really good at it. It’s probably where I got my eye for detail: there’s no undo with henna, so every line has to be right the first time.
