How to Hire Entrepreneurial Engineers and Why You Need Them

Level-up Engineering

Interview with Mark Kinsella, VP of Engineering at Opendoor about what makes entrepreneurial engineers great and how to lead them. We go in-depth from the definition through the key qualities of entrepreneurial engineers, hiring and retaining them, and much more.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition and qualities of entrepreneurial engineers
• Hiring entrepreneurial engineers
• Onboarding and retaining entrepreneurial engineers
• Nurturing the business mindset in software engineers
• Culturally supporting the business mindset
• Giving feedback to engineers
• Preventing burnout for entrepreneurial engineers

Excerpt from the interview:

"At Opendoor, we need to ingest a large amount of data. Real estate data is public, so we need to process all that data to make informed decisions. We had a hard time importing MLS and home data because it was so messy.

At the end of the day, a few of our engineers went to shadow agents at a different company who were importing this data. They tried to understand the customer’s perspective and what they were doing. They took the insights they’d collected, and managed to build a better data ingestion pipeline.

Understanding their customer made it possible to build a faster and scalable tech solution. This initiative and creative thinking got us to the point where we could ingest more data with higher reliability. This is an example of why we want to work with entrepreneurial engineers."

Click here to read the full interview!