We have ten new employees! (ssr)
Written by Taran Enger-Mår
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In these times, being able to grow and employ talented individuals is a privilege. Sanity is continuing to develop well, both as a community and as a company, and we are confident about our future.
For a long time, like other companies at our stage, the Sanity team has done incredible things with a relatively small team. We have worked hard to improve our product, added great new features and scaled our services. Hard work pays off, and we are happy to announce that we are welcoming ten new colleagues to our team.
In August 2019, we set out to expand our team to the US by establishing Sanity Inc, and opened up our US headquarters in San Francisco. Now, half of our new teammates are based in the US, substantially strengthening our presence.
Since last summer, we have had a clear diversity strategy. We are still falling short of our goals and we have a long way to go. Yet we are happy to see that we are moving the needle on diversity within our company.
This round of hiring also represents a new chapter for Sanity, adding four fully remote employees. This is a new way of working for us, and we are excited to learn and develop our remote practices going forward.
We spend a lot of time identifying our next colleagues. We firmly believe a company’s success depends on its people, who they are, what they bring, and how they are developed. Not only do we want to bring in the right people, but we want them working on important areas that are core to our values.
- Our product is the core of what we do. We are strengthening our engineering and design team with five new colleagues. We have a long roadmap of great ideas we want to bring to life such as improving our studio API, upping the overall developer experience, and increasing the collaborative capabilities of our platform. Please welcome Rex, Benedicte, Mikolaj, Dain and Alex!
- Developers are our core users. We want to triple down our efforts in building a thriving community and improving their experience. We are proud to grow a team to focus on developer relations and community with three new colleagues. Each brings new perspectives and experiences that will drive the dialogue with our community and bring Sanity to new users. Please welcome Kap, Bryan and Peter!
- With an open source Studio, and a great community, the value of our product increases with the numbers of users we have. We will continue to build a team that can communicate and drive the marketing of Sanity, and we are strengthening the team with two new colleagues, please welcome Alyssa and Will!
We look forward to getting started again after summer together with our fantastic team, boosted with motivation and renewed energy!
This is only the beginning and we are still hiring. Do visit our careers page for the latest open positions. There are more to come in August!
Meet our new team members
You can read about our new colleagues below or catch up with them in our community!
Alyssa Nader is our new Product Marketing Manager. She joins our team after working as an independent creative strategy consultant and writer. Alyssa is into branding/markets and even funded a collective to satirize them through magazines and performance art. She had no plans of joining a company full-time, but says she was impressed by her conversations with the Sanity team. When asked why she joined, she says: “their thoughtfulness, humor, and self-awareness towards business, culture, and developing technology was something I'd never seen. It made joining their adventure irresistible”. Alyssa joins us 1 August and will work out of our San Francisco office!
Alexander Staubo is our new Backend Developer. Alexander is not really “new” to the company, as he has been collaborating with Simen (our CTO) on and off since 1997! He joins our team from Transparensee where he worked on their real-estate app Enclosure. Alex joined us on 11 May and will work remotely in the US!
Benedicte Emilie Brækken is our new Full Stack Developer. With emphasis on the “full” part, considering she’s not only worked with everything from frontend and backend to mobile app development. But also isn’t afraid of getting hands-on with neither Linux, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. Benedicte has broad experience, and in one of her previous jobs she ran web ops for NRK.no, one of Norway’s biggest news sites. When she’s not writing by hand with “old fashioned” fountain pens or brewing delicious coffee (of course with her beloved V60 or Rancilio Silvia espresso maker), you can probably find her trying to move more of her life into her zsh-terminal. After having built and scaled the technology and the tech team at Kron.no as CTO, she wanted to move back to her roots as a “pure” technologist. Benedicte joins us this fall, working out of our Oslo office!
Bryan Robinson is our new Developer Relations Specialist. Before joining Sanity, Bryan considered himself a "free-agent developer advocate" writing and recording about topics he cared deeply about - specifically CSS and the Jamstack. Before that, he led development and design teams for agencies and built unified front-ends for large-scale news sites. Bryan is an author, course creator, live coder and educator. When asked why he joined Sanity, he says: "Sanity is a company that is going to drastically shape the way we deal with content. In talking with everyone, I knew I'd find a home within a company as thoughtful and deliberative about the future of content and the Web as Sanity is”. Bryan has started his journey as one of our remote employees in the US, having joined us 6 July!
Dain Cilke is our new Engineering Manager. Dain is a software developer turned manager. He has worked with a broad range of technologies, from language design to networked audio to e-commerce to industrial analytics. Dain joins our team from Arundo Analytics, and when asked why he joined Sanity he says: “I couldn't pass up the chance to work on an exciting product with an awesome team”. Dain joined us 4 May, and works out of our Oslo office!
Kapehe is our new Developer Relations Specialist. Kapehe joins Sanity from Auth0, and has been working closely with the developer community from a variety of mediums. You can find Kapehe’s work in blog posts, on Auth0's blog, on YouTube, conference talks, and even podcasts. Kapehe finds a lot of joy in helping developers create, and she says she joins Sanity because Sanity also helps developers create: “Whether you are creating a quick JAMstack project or need a reliable content backend, Sanity is so dynamic!”. Kapehe joined us on 20 July and will be working remotely in the US. Keep in touch with Kapehe on Twitter
Mikolaj Dobrucki is our new Digital Product Designer. Mikolaj joins our team after spending the past year finishing his MSc in Malmö. Mikolaj has an accurate graphic design sensibility, solid interaction design credentials and enjoys crafting front-end code. He is passionate about teaching his skills to others. He has both presented at conferences and has published pieces in both Smashing Magazine and CSS Tricks. Get to know more about him through his side-projects, writing, presentations and portfolios here. Mikolaj joined us 1 July, and works out of our Oslo office!
Peter Hofstee is our new Community Engineer. Peter joins Sanity full time after first voluntarily helping out in the community and engaging with us as a consultant. He has solid experience in tech and international relations, leading a web agency for 15 years and launching multiple non-profits, such as a platform for refugees and an initiative for open diplomacy. Most recently, he founded a digital events start-up in Spain. He also built a business around remote-working solutions in 2005, and is therefore particularly proud to be Sanity’s first remote hire! Peter has worked with us for a while, but will join us full time 1 August!
Rex Raphael is our new Full Stack Developer. Rex is a software engineer with many years of experience in the Web development industry. He joins Sanity from Snowball, where he worked as a software developer and architect for a software based loT system. Rex is passionate about resilient and scalable systems with near/real time communication. He also devotes his time to helping less experienced developers find their footing in their career path as well as helping less privileged children and young people. Rex is a Nigerian and has a small NGO for helping a small group of young Nigerians find a career in tech. When asked why he joins Sanity, he says: “while searching for a good headless CMS for my blog, I ended up loving Sanity and how passionate they are about open sourcing projects, I fell in love with GROQ and then the software stack just made sense in this modern day”. Rex will join us this fall working from our Oslo office.
Will Luna is our new Data Analyst Growth. Will joins our team from being in similar roles at Booksy and Tradecraft in San Francisco. He is passionate about customer segmentation, data visualization, and product analytics. When he’s not writing macros or making a new dashboard, you can find Will practicing his Mandarin and jazz drumming. Will holds a BA in Creative Computing & Cognitive Science from Tufts University, and you can find his personal projects and writing here. Will joined us on 15 June, and will work out of our San Francisco office!