About LightForce and what they do
You've probably heard about aligners and the various aligner companies that are out there. They're heartedness at this point. You know, the interesting thing is that 80% of treatments, that orthodontists treat actually can't be done with aligners. They're all done with braces. And so LightForce is the only 3d printed custom braces solution for patients giving a very personalized care to the patient, we're able to take the patient's smell and design custom brackets for them. That ensures better patient outcomes, faster treatment and more efficiencies for both the patient and the doctor.
Details on LightForce's engineering team
So our product team, including engineering, and product management, and design is about 45 people, that's about seven on the product and design team and about 40 in the software engineering team. We do a lot as well to collaborate with other departments, including our hardware team and others. So I think one of the unique things about LightForce is how our product team and engineering team, there's a lot that we're doing interface with other departments, whether it's hardware or manufacturing, digital technicians, I think it's one of the unique things about LightForce is that we're beyond the team as well, we're collaborating with a lot of different departments to help design better smiles.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
So we work very closely as between product and engineering, we do use Scrum. And really, the way that we like to work is that we're in lockstep along the whole way, right? Whether that's starting at the customer research phase, when we're trying to understand the problems, we like having engineers part of that conversation. So they understand the problems is we're tackling them. And you know, as a team, we're then under, you know, we're taking some of the product specifications that we like putting together, breaking them down together, and then using agile methodologies to deliver them in an incremental fashion. So really, you know, we like to work hand in hand with our teams, it's something that we believe leads to better outcomes for our customers.
Details on the tech stack
We like to say we're a web first company that whether it's our doctors who are our customers, or our internal users of our software, we are web first. So from a front end point of view, we do things in Angular, we do a lot of things in 3d with WebGL, and three, Jas, on the back end, can API layer, we do things in Node and express. And we're very much we lean very much heavily into AWS services for everything that we do as well.
What to expect during the interview process
So this is going to be true of both product and engineering. But we usually start off with an introductory call of about 45 minutes an hour to make sure that your goals align with what we're looking for, and that there's that fit. See me get past that we do a test task both for product managers and for the engineering team to understand, you know how it is that you approach problems. And we use that to drive kind of the next set of inter technical interviews, to understand on the engineering side to understand, you know, the skills that you have and your experience, and on the product management side to understand how it'll be like to work with us and to work with you on different problems. From that point on, we usually will go have you interview with our VP engineering or CTO potentially. And then we're usually very quick on our turnarounds here, when we like people, we move very quickly as well.
About LightForce's culture
I actually joined LightForce in the middle of COVID. And, you know, I did not meet any of my coworkers until almost a year into the job. But I felt like the first time I actually met several of my co workers, I felt like I was meeting friends again. And I think that just speaks to the culture and the excitement that my peers have here that I felt like even though we were separated geographically or through zoom and through screens, I think it really speaks to the amount of collaboration and care that everyone has for each other. That, you know, we span across a few different continents and several different countries and kind of across the board. You get that sense from everyone. So I think there if speaking about culture, I think it's one of the things that LightForce has. It's very strong. And you feel it to the point where even our customers commented on that in our first user conference as well that they could see how that love and focus for our customers really comes through with how we work together.
Why now is the ideal time to join
So we've been experiencing immense growth as a company. And with that our growing needs and challenges to support really a couple of different types of customers, there's there are doctors who, at the end of the day order the brackets and the trays that they use for their patients. But we also have internal customers who we provide tools with to make them more efficient. And we're in an interesting time in the company where every person that comes in, has such a huge impact on the experience of these users. We are definitely one where a company where you will see and feel the impact of the things that you work on as both a product person or as an engineer, when things go alive, for example, into production, we have, you know, 50, plus likes and hearts, emojis on the posts that we do internally to do product launches, within five minutes. We also have doctors who are customers who will, you know, wake up in the middle of the night and with a crazy idea, and they love our product so much that they reach out, shoot that message over to our product team about the crazy insights that they have on, you know, future ideas and how we can make the product even better. And I think that truly speaks to the excitement that our customers have that if you were to join our company that you'll feel and I think it's very unique and how I've never worked on a product that's so beloved by their customers before like I in my career, I've worked on a lot of products that people love. But just the excitement everyday that you hear from internal and external customers is ridiculous. It's an insane amount of excitement for the work that we do here. On top of that, I think we're also in a really unique position to leverage kind of a really neat intersection of a lot of new technologies, right? It we're at the intersection of how we work with 3d printing and divide that with software and innovative hardware design. And so as an engineer or product person in this space, you get to face a lot of unique challenges that you're not really going to get up elsewhere. On top of that, too, I think, as in we're in a place where we are one of the few who are really leveraging kind of fronting like 3d printing as a frontier technology to do mass customization. I think it's such a unique opportunity to be able to say, hey, we have a factory. And these technologies are part of that. And we're actually we're offering a product that is uniquely suited for that kind of muscle mass customization that 3d printing enables. So if any of that excites you, if you're looking for unique challenges, if you're looking to solve really interesting product problems and you like a challenge, this is a great place to be.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
