Humans of Pathpoint: Graham

Meet Graham

Graham is a Software Engineer on the Platform team, focusing on Infrastructure.

What does the Platform team do? Graham says “The other engineers are our customers - we want to make their lives as easy as possible. If I do my job right, things work seamlessly for them.”

Graham enjoys working on infrastructure because he was able to help create the way the engineering team builds, deploys and maintains the Pathpoint application. The team uses state of the art infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS-CDK, allowing them to automatically spin up copies of the infrastructure when engineers make pull requests so they can test the change in isolation across the infrastructure. There is an automated deployment process once tests pass that deploys to the app without any manual steps. This lets engineers add a line of code to a file and commit the code and it appears in a remote test version of the Pathpoint app.

In layman’s terms, this means engineers can seamlessly and quickly deploy changes to the platform without any downtime. This also means that bugs in the platform can get fixed in as little as an hour, so if an agent encounters an error, they can log back in after a quick engineering fix and their issue will be solved. “We are always looking for ways to streamline deploying code to our user-facing app.”

“Having a Platform team allows us to iterate quickly and not get bogged down by tedious deployment processes, if engineers aren't working on infrastructure, they don't have to think about how things work - it just does.” 

Why does he like working on the Platform team? “We have a fun, close knit team, we enjoy each other’s company. Everyone is very supportive, if you need help, they’re ready to go out of their way to help you. There’s a nice give and take.”

Graham joined Pathpoint because “the team is nice to work with, it is a smaller company, I knew my work would have a big impact on the end product, and I was able to have a lot of responsibility right off the bat.”

Why work at an insurance company? “Insurance is part of everyday life. The world wouldn't work without insurance. Everyone needs it, and it's never going to go away. It deserves to be focused on.”

When he’s not working, Graham likes to golf, ski, and practice latte art.