Matt Young describes his first week as VP of Engineering

We are very pleased to welcome Matt Young as our new head of engineering.  Matt has previously worked in senior roles at Betfair, Sapient and Bloomberg (to name a few).  Matt brings a wealth of experience to True Knowledge and we are excited to be working with him.

For this post I thought I would also ask Matt a couple of interview questions.

Hi Matt, what drew you to Cambridge and True Knowledge?

Two things really: the product and the team.  What True Knowledge is building is something that has eluded many larger organisations: a search technology that can give you an answer to your question rather than just list web pages which might or might not contain the information you need. You can instantly see how useful that would be in all sorts of scenarios. Moreover, in the form of our beta site, we already have a proof-of-concept that it can work for a good number of questions and facts.

Equally, the other thing that's attractive about True Knowledge is the team that's been assembled here already (which we will be growing further over the coming year).  The people are all really bright, friendly and approachable, and come from a wide variety of backgrounds.  You always feel that there is plenty to learn from talking to your colleagues.

Please describe your first week at True Knowledge.

It's been fairly hectic but also very interesting and enjoyable.  Aside from meeting people and getting to grips with how the core technology works, we're adapting our development processes to cope with a growing team and starting work to scale our knowledge engine up to handle very large quantities of users and facts.

Unlike some previous roles where I've had to build tech teams from scratch, which can be slow going, I'm lucky here to be coming in to manage an existing team of very capable can-do people.  They have helped me get my feet under the desk very quickly and it already feels like I've been here a couple of months rather than just a couple of weeks.  There's a lot of work to do, and we're still recruiting (looking for strong C++ and PHP developers) to give us additional capacity to get everything done that we want to, but we manage to have fun at the same time.  People mostly eat lunch together, and we've already had a company curry night since I've joined, so it's very sociable.

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