Alex Corotchi started at Q4 15 years ago and had four different roles. He shares why it’s never been boring and how it’s felt like three different companies. Now his vision is to build the best engineering team in the world.

I started working at Q4 as a young engineer who wanted to work at a startup and experiment with front-end and back-end development. 

As the company grew, my role changed with it. I became a manager and now as a vice president, my everyday work and challenges have changed a lot but company culture and values are pretty much the same. 

Right now the vision around my department is to be the best engineering team in the world. I want to share my own experience and why I believe Q4 is the best place to grow your engineering career.  

How 15 years at Q4 has felt like three different companies

You never 100% think you’re ready when you’re making a job change. You’re given chances to take risks and prove yourself by working hard, and you’ll never know if it’s the right time.

That’s how I felt starting in Q4 and in the many roles I’ve grown into here. I started when we were less than 20 people as a company. Now we’re more than 500 people globally. We’re a results-driven and ambitious company, and we just get things done. 

It has felt like I’ve worked with at least three different companies within my time in Q4. It’s never been boring working here, and that's what has made me stay at Q4 for over a decade. I always had the opportunity to learn new things and find ways to create an impact on Q4.

We’ve always been committed to helping our customers manage investor relations, and the way we’ve done that always evolving, and the products we build are evolving also. We always elevate our bars when it comes to customers' expectations, what we did yesterday is old today, and we always need to elevate our bars.

Our CEO Darrell Heaps, has supported me all the way through. He encouraged me for every single career opportunity and new role I took on at Q4.

You want to work with leaders who are not afraid to take risks, especially when it’s about giving people chances. You always want the room to experiment and practice in order to achieve the level you want to be at.

Thanks to support from my leadership and team, I’ve had a great career path here through five roles:  

• Sr Developer 
• Team Lead 
• Engineering Manager 
• Director of Product Development 
• VP, Technology 

Now, as a leader, I try to reflect the same support and encouragement to my team and new employees to follow their interests and focus on growth as I was given. Growth for individuals and teams also means growth for the company. 

Changing to a platform mindset to best help our customers 

In 2022, we released the first version of our platform called Capital Connect which I’m super proud of. For us, this product is not just a technology but also a piece of art. It changed even the way we work and even the way we think. It is the next chapter in our next-level evolution.

Public companies are our main customers, and this product helps them to succeed in the capital markets. We’re helping connect public companies with the right investors continuously through this platform, and providing our customers with a delightful experience. 

What excited me the most personally is that I truly believe we can help our customers, and help them make their experience better but also change how investor relations are done in public companies.   

While working on this product, we changed how we worked as a team to have a platform mindset. It helped us break down technical silos and build integrated applications at scale. You can read more about the technical parts of this and how we did it on our R&D blog.

Our vision: Build the best engineering team in the world.

I see my role as trying to connect every engineering team member to be part of our vision. Our mission is to give our customers high-quality software to make them happy using our products. The way to do that is to be the best engineering team out there that is connected to company strategy. 

We celebrate our wins through quarterly town hall meetings with the entire R&D team, where teams share their wins and the journey of how they achieved them. We also have bi-annual hackathon events where engineers have the opportunity to meet cross-functionally and have fun outside of their day-to-day team structure.

It may be technical here, but the strategy to become the best team is to achieve an Elite engineering team using DORA metrics (DevOps Research and Assessment) by google. DORA uses four criteria to measure the team performance level: Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recover, and Change Failure Rate.

The number one focus for us to get there is our people. We’re looking for engineers who are: 

• A team player - All the success in Q4 is around the team, and it is critical for us for a candidate to be a team player versus a solo player, where we win and lose together.
  
  
• A problem solver - There are no initiatives in Q4, especially in the engineering team, that won’t involve challenging problems. We need to have people who don't give up on the first bump but accept the challenge and focus on creative ways to resolve it.
  
  
• Open-minded - The world is continuously changing, and the stuff that worked yesterday is not always the best choice tomorrow. We need to be open-minded and open to changes, and constantly learn to improve. 

We’re an agile and transparent team and are not afraid to share our wins and challenges with the entire department and company if needed. 

We keep focusing on maintaining a healthy culture and supporting team members in their growth.

What has kept me at Q4 for my career is the growth opportunities. You have an opportunity to jump on this vision and grow your career as part of this ambitious engineering team too.

Learn more about life inside Q4 as an engineer on our R&D blog.