Our team members are an integral part of what makes Sortly a great place to work. Every month, we’ll be spotlighting a member of the Sortly team to learn about their role, their accomplishments, their challenges, and their journey at Sortly.
This month, we’re spotlighting our very own Patrick Grimes. Patrick is a Senior Data Engineer at Sortly and helps build the tools and systems to grow and improve the Sortly platform—and helps our customers use their Sortly data to better understand their own businesses. Here’s what Patrick had to say about his journey at Sortly and what advice he has for prospective candidates.
How long have you worked at Sortly?
My one-year Sortly anniversary is in September—it is crazy how fast the first year has gone by.
What does your role entail?
As a data engineer, my role entails a healthy mix of wrangling Sortly’s backend data so it is ready for analytics, and building out the tools and systems we need to support our growth. I also spend a lot of time thinking about our customers’ data and how we can make it easier for them to analyze their own businesses more effectively at scale.
What gets you excited to come to work each morning?
I used to be a supply chain manager in manufacturing/retail and I have had some intimate experiences with inventory management. I would have killed to have an app like Sortly back then and I love seeing our customers get so much value out of Sortly.
What originally attracted you to Sortly? And how has Sortly changed since you joined?
I love that Sortly solves a tangible problem for so many customers, but also the team is incredible and the work is challenging. We’ve grown as a company since I joined but the team remains top-notch and we’ve done a good job at staying one step ahead of managing increasing complexity at the company.
What advice do you have for prospective Sortly candidates?
From my experience, there aren’t a lot of startup companies like Sortly out there that have the trifecta: a great business that is truly valuable to our customers, a great team, and engaging work. Do your best to get in here!
What do you find most challenging at Sortly?
We have a rapidly growing user base and have some of the typical challenges that companies face. However, a bigger challenge is that our users can utilize Sortly for a wide variety of use cases, which can often surprise us. Our team is very good at integrating individual customer feedback into the bigger picture and so far that has helped us come up with great solutions while staying relevant to our entire customer base.
What are some of the professional challenges you’ve tackled, the most interesting projects you’ve worked on, and/or your proudest moment at Sortly?
I am really excited about some of the upcoming architectural changes to Sortly’s backend that will help us continue to scale up and unlock new analytics features for our customers—stay tuned for that! So far though, I am super proud of some of the data modeling projects in our data warehouse that integrate many of our data sources and have unlocked more granular analysis of how our customers become successful with Sortly.
What do you like to do outside of work—passion projects, hobbies, family?
I have two cats who both demand to be played with every day. Also, my brother runs a wood shop so I spend a lot of my weekends with him working on furniture pieces.
Where is your favorite place in the world?
Whistler (I lobby for an offsite trip there every chance I get).
What is one food you can’t resist?
A new dim sum place opened up down the street from me and their steamed buns are out of this world.
Sortly is a SaaS company that helps businesses streamline and modernize every aspect of managing inventory. Learn more about Sortly’s mission and browse our open roles.
