Pat was our first ever employee at Instant. Pat joined us just over a year ago and has been pivotal in building the product we now know and love. He’s worked alongside our founders, Liam and Will, from the very beginning. Joining us from Uber mid-covid, thanks to a cold LinkedIn message - Pat is our resident board games enthusiast & all-star engineer.
What do you do at Instant?
I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Instant, primarily focused on building out the backend of the Instant checkout platform. This is what powers the Instant product, and ties together all of the many integrations that we are working on that enable us to deliver the standard Instant offering to merchants, regardless of what technologies they’re already using to power their e-commerce business. And of course we're also constantly working hard to ensure that what we're building is reliable, secure, scalable, and extensible.
Why did you join Instant?
Working at a startup was always on my radar, and after spending my career up until this point working at medium and large companies, I decided that the time was right to take the plunge and put my skills and experience to the test.
As for Instant specifically - the company vision is ambitious, and one that I think has real potential. Taking on the challenge of bringing this vision to life, whilst being part of a growing company and establishing a brand gets me incredibly pumped for the future of Instant.
What have you done within your time at Instant that you’re most proud of?
In general, helping build out our tech stack and product from scratch into something that is now live and used by thousands of customers is incredibly rewarding.
But if I had to pick something specific, it would be the complete overhaul of our entire backend, which we undertook earlier this year. As we prepared to scale after validating the product with our first client, we decided to rebuild our platform from the ground up in a way that was truly scalable and extensible. Over 4 months we re-architected, implemented, and migrated to our new version of Instant. And with a lot of effort and coordination we were able to do this without any interruptions to our already-live merchants. Shoutout to Will (CTO/co-founder) for his contributions to this too.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I like to keep fit and stay healthy, exercising or hitting the gym. I enjoy playing video games, I’ve been playing a lot of Rocket League lately. I’ve also been getting into a lot of board games recently, I have picked up a lot of 2-4 player games that I’ve been enjoying with my fiancé, or with close friends.
What would you say to someone who wants to become an engineer for a startup like Instant?
As a software engineer at a startup, you’ll be exposed to a very broad range of experiences. One day you might be in the weeds of debugging some very specific issue, and the next you might be designing out some high-level architecture, or researching technologies to adopt. You’ll need to be prepared for an ever-changing pace of work, and new surprises and challenges around every corner.
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