As it turns out, you don’t have to be a NASA engineer to work on the technology that will send astronauts back to the Moon (and eventually to Mars). You also don’t need to work at an electric car company with an “extremely hardcore” CEO if you want to develop artificial intelligence systems with advanced image recognition features.
Tech professionals can take on these challenges and more right here in Colorado, which is filled with companies with big plans for 2023. We recently spoke with leaders at four of these companies to learn more about their visions for the upcoming year, the projects on their roadmaps and how employees will grow professionally from them.
These tech leaders aren’t just looking for cogs to put into their companies’ dream machines. In addition to pushing their companies to new heights, executing on these visions will also help team members grow professionally. Mitch Catino, chief product officer at GigSmart, said the work his team will take on in 2023 will position them for advancement.
“The projects they will be working on will provide exposure to many different technologies, business logic and integrations and set them up to be able to work on any type of project in the future,” Catino said. “Those who gain the knowledge and expertise from these projects will be the company’s knowledge and thought leaders of the future and power our growth.”
With 2023 right around the corner, now is the perfect time to draw up a short list of companies to grow your career next year. Continue reading to read why these four should make the cut.
HoneyBee Robotics builds robotics systems used by NASA, the military, petrochemical companies and more. Erik Mumm, VP of motion control, told Built In Colorado that his team will have their hands full with space work in 2023 thanks to NASA’s plans to return to the Moon and to venture to Mars.
What are the technology trends that are currently impacting your industry as a whole, and how are you planning to harness or react to those trends in 2023?
We continue to see compelling market growth in space systems. For our motion control sector, these opportunities range from contributing hardware to very large constellations to smaller numbers of high-performance spacecraft. We are uniquely situated to capture new business in both of these realms due to our product development and manufacturing capabilities.
The growth in these markets has afforded us exciting opportunities to contribute to otherworldly missions where spacecraft are collecting and transmitting ever-increasing amounts of data, extending missions of high-value assets, and exploring the Moon, Mars and Titan, to name a few. We have dramatically expanded our production throughput in 2022 and continue to support next-generation hardware developments.
As we launch more space systems, the tasks these vehicles will be executing continue to push the envelope of technology.”
What is the biggest project your teams will be working on in the next year, and how will it influence the overall success of the business?
We are excited about the possibilities afforded by NASA’s Artemis mission and the increasing opportunities we see in making frequent trips to the Moon and Mars a reality. As we launch more space systems, the tasks these vehicles will be executing continue to push the envelope of technology and we find ourselves at the forefront of those developments. Our team is contributing hardware to these missions that entail significant efforts in mechanical, electrical, systems, software engineering, flight hardware production and space simulation testing.
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members who will be working on these projects?
As our business grows, our team grows with it. This growth nets more opportunities in existing functions within our organization, but also new positions will be created through expanding our technological capability and market presence. We anticipate growth in design engineering, production, test, program management, finance and supply chain, for example. Our team will continue to support all manner of space flight programs spanning civil, military and commercial exploration. These opportunities will not stop within Earth’s orbit but rather contribute to humanity’s ever-expanding presence in our solar system.
Retail and restaurant workers use FORM’s digital assistant platform to streamline data collection, manage tasks, and engage with teams. The company’s image recognition solution uses AI to analyze grocery store shelves, enabling brand reps to quickly see if their products are stocked and in the right spots.
Alexander Zagvazdin, global VP of product management, said his team will be making this tool more robust in 2023, both in terms of its recognition capabilities and reporting.
What are the technology trends that are currently impacting your industry as a whole, and how are you planning to harness or react to those trends in 2023?
At FORM, we are particularly focused on AI. Our image recognition app allows teams to retrieve information about product availability, price, compliance and more simply from a picture captured onsite. In 2023, we’re doubling down on the mission of building the best-in-class AI solution. As economic trends like supply chain issues and labor shortages persist, we will ensure that our software provides a fast, easy and accurate way to collect data. Our AI saves our customers from thousands of hours of manual data entry and allows them to capture data that would otherwise be unavailable.
Another trend in tech is the increasing reliance on data in decision-making. Next year, we’ll be focusing on delivering more data, faster data and better data to our customers. We are working on ways to increase the number of products we can recognize, how to extract more data from the same pictures, and improving ways to capture images for ease of use.
We’ll mainly focus on the continuous improvement of our image recognition AI.”
What is the biggest project your teams will be working on in the next year, and how will it influence the overall success of Form?
We’ll mainly focus on the continuous improvement of our image recognition AI, including the ability to recognize products in more settings — like low lighting and around corners — and the ability to learn new products more quickly. Our engineering and data science teams are working on a proprietary machine learning model that trains stock-keeping units 100x faster, requiring them to constantly experiment with and develop new algorithms.
We’ll also be focusing on features that make results available in nearly real-time. We will be building a highly configurable KPI engine that will process, calculate and display data almost immediately. Creating this functionality will be a cross-team effort for the machine learning, software engineering and data platform teams.
Lastly, we’ll be broadening our APIs and integration capabilities. This will involve our engineering team creating an SDK for mobile with easy-to-use interfaces and creating documentation that will make it easy for external developers to work with. We also have some exciting innovations planned in the world of augmented reality, which will be an entire team effort as we continue to push the boundaries of the industry.
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members who will be working on these projects?
We have a strong culture and invest in the growth and development of our employees. Our engineers are encouraged to improve their technical skills, learn new tools and technologies, and go deeper into learning about what they currently use. The projects that we work on are challenging and on the cutting edge of technology, and we work with the latest tools and libraries available, some even developed in-house. We also have seasoned engineering leaders who have served at everything from startups to public companies who mentor our teams.
Our teams also grow and change with our products, and opportunities frequently open up for management roles, which is a great way for engineers to take the next step in their careers. Over the years we have also seen people switch to entirely different fields, moving from roles in technical support to roles in engineering or solution architecture. Whatever path our team members choose, we encourage them to own their roles, get involved with the company and live out our core values.
American Auto Shield provides vehicle service contracts — think insurance for maintenance purposes — for cars, motorcycles and ATVs. Braden Bowers, software engineering manager, shared a bit of the tech org’s 2023 roadmap, which includes a “high-impact high-visibility” engineering project and a new data science pipeline.
What are the technology trends that are currently impacting your industry as a whole, and how are you planning to harness or react to those trends in 2023?
Our 2023 technology roadmap will include enhancing our systems integrations within the Salesforce domain to improve and streamline end-user workflows. Among these integrations and enhancements will be the creation of a web presence to move initial customer interactions from telephony to a web-based setting, which will be a high-impact high-visibility project for our engineering team. Machine learning and AI will become crucial to effectively analyzing big data in order to provide the company with actionable insights that drive strategic business decisions and keep ahead of the competition.
American Auto Shield has grown 10x over the last four years, propelling our engineering and data science teams into high-growth mode.”
What is the biggest project your teams will be working on in the next year, and how will it influence the overall success of the American Auto Shield?
Our engineering team will be heavily focused on building systems that directly impact our employees’ day-to-day work. These projects are a direct response to current business needs. We have a suite of greenfield applications that have been built within the last two years. Our Salesforce team is innovating new ways to create engaging user interfaces as well as creating smart automation and integrations. Our custom development and Azure cloud team is working to enrich our applications by utilizing the offerings of the Azure cloud.
This coming year, our data science team will be building an end-to-end data science pipeline that leverages a scalable cloud computing architecture. The pipeline includes ETL, EDA, data wrangling and machine learning model deployment that will provide the systematic analytical insights required by our key stakeholders to make strategic business decisions.
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members who will be working on these projects?
American Auto Shield has grown 10x over the last four years, propelling our engineering and data science teams into high-growth mode. We continue to need more complex processes and technologies as our organization grows. We’re committed to promoting from within, along with the recruitment of top technological talent. We are both an innovation-focused and learning-focused technical team, and there are endless opportunities to suggest new tools and technologies to improve our systems.
GigSmart connects people looking for shift work, full-time positions or home improvement projects with companies and people that need staff. Mitch Catino, chief product officer, told Built In Colorado that consolidation of services is a major trend in the staffing world and that GigSmart’s 2023 tech roadmap is designed to position the company as a complete end-to-end hiring solution.
What are the technology trends that are currently impacting your industry as a whole, and how are you planning to harness or react to those trends in 2023?
The key trends GigSmart sees and is solving for are speed, cost and consolidation. GigSmart began as the first platform to provide on-demand, as-soon-as-possible labor. Today, GigSmart can source candidates, run background checks and facilitate payment to workers within the same day. In 2023, we will continue to expand our abilities at unmatched speeds.
GigSmart has taken steps throughout our life cycle to provide our services at the lowest cost in the industry and will continue to drive costs down for our users in 2023 as we scale. Lastly, there is a desire for companies to consolidate providers in the labor market. Businesses no longer want to use 10 different platforms for sourcing, hiring, training and paying full-time or temporary employees. GigSmart is ideally positioned to continue introducing products and services that will allow businesses to manage their labor needs under one platform.
Those who gain the knowledge and expertise from these projects will be the company’s knowledge and thought leaders of the future and power our growth.”
What is the biggest project your teams will be working on in the next year, and how will it influence the overall success of GigSmart?
In 2023 we are focused on continuing to support our users by providing new solutions, including W-2 opportunities, additional enterprise functionality, enhanced access to financial products and services, and optimizing the management of both internal and external labor. These projects will include both internal tooling and external partnerships to provide GigSmart customers with access to best-in-class technology and solutions.
What career growth opportunities do you see for the team members who will be working on these projects?
Team members at GigSmart work on exciting and innovative projects that push them to develop creative solutions to problems. The projects they will be working on in 2023 will provide exposure to many different technologies, business logic and integrations and set them up to be able to work on any type of project in the future. Those who gain the knowledge and expertise from these projects will be the company’s knowledge and thought leaders of the future and power our growth.
