A Bittersweet Farewell

Today is my last day at Leverege. Four years ago, I joined this 4-person IoT startup with three other Venture for America fellows as a Product Engineer, not knowing a single thing about IoT. Fast forward to today, Leverege has since grown in size, and I am leaving with significant experience up and down the IoT stack from hardware, firmware, cloud to the end-user application.

In my time at Leverege, I was extremely fortunate to really live the startup cliche of wearing many hats:

• ML Researcher: My first assignment was to research different NLP algorithms and design a chatbot for a military application
• Tech Writer: As part of our content marketing strategy, I started writing articles and whitepapers on various IoT topics on our company blog. That blog has now grown to be IoT for All.
• Systems Engineer: Luckily all that time spent on writing didn’t go to waste as Leverege landed our first large customer when one of the VPs read an article about IoT protocols and reached out to run some experiments. I leaned on my ECE background to create Arduino prototypes and demonstrate the value of IoT.
• Field Engineer: After a successful demo, we moved into a large-scale pilot for an asset tracking use case. I spent many weeks down in Florida manually installing trackers, debugging field issues, and conducting user research to scale the solution.
• Fullstack Engineer: As the use cases began to grow, I transitioned into a fullstack developer, building web applications to satisfy customer requirements. The experience in the field really helped here to balance out the customer pain points with technical feasibility.
• Cloud Architect/SRE: Finally with each use case scaling rapidly, there was a growing need for an internal engineering/infrastructure team. We successfully migrated from running Docker containers on VMs to Kubernetes and implemented modern DevOps toolkits to stabilize the overall platform.

With those experiences behind me, I realized that I wanted to specialize in one area in software engineering for personal growth. The freedom I had at Leverege to learn on the job was amazing, but I reached a point where I felt the value I was providing on the infrastructure side was no longer aligned with the key milestones for the company’s growth. On the technical side, the key focus at Leverege was working on Low-Power, Wide-Area (LPWA) applications, which required various design choices on cloud infrastructure and application to minimize payload size and communication frequency. I wanted a new challenge, so I looked to the opposite end of the spectrum of high-frequency, real-time applications. After much deliberation, I decided to join a fintech startup called Axoni to apply distributed ledger technology to solve hard problems in global capital markets.

I’m still a huge believer in IoT and positive about the future of Leverege. While I am excited about my new role in the blockchain world, it is bittersweet to be leaving behind great friends, mentors, and an inspiring group of individuals at Leverege. I will definitely miss the jokes, fun business trips out to the top of Jungfrau and Cameron Indoor to see Zion dominate, and the sacred lunch breaks in person before the days of COVID. Thanks for the great memories and giving me the opportunity to grow both as an engineer and as a person even though I showed up like this on my first day of work: