Get to Know AJ, Our New VP of Engineering

What’s been your journey in engineering so far, and what led you to Sixfold?

So, I started my engineering journey as an iOS engineer, building small mobile apps for a web agency. I then moved into full-stack engineering before working at a small startup in the healthcare space.

Most recently, I had the opportunity to lead a team running a cross-functional enterprise program at American Express that involved the coordination of about 100 people. That’s where I worked closely with our now-CTO, Brian Moseley—we worked really well together. Brian asked me to join Sixfold to help scale out the engineering operations and I couldn’t be more excited!

When hiring, what’s one quality or signal you always pay close attention to?

You know, there are a few core qualities I look for when building an engineering team, but one that’s especially important in our environment? Curiosity.
In the rapidly evolving world of neural network technologies, we need folks who are innately curious to learn new things, explore the unknown, and help us push the boundaries of what’s possible.

How do you approach balancing speed with quality when building and shipping products?

There’s a great phrase from the Navy Seals: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” I think this concept doesn’t get enough credit in software engineering. By making investments in our SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), we will unlock the faster delivery of high-quality software.

I don’t think sacrificing things like automated testing is a great strategy – it will eventually slow your team down, and your product will deteriorate over time. Many companies make this mistake. I believe that by continually producing a steady stream of high-quality features, our customer confidence will remain high and our speed to market will be higher than our competitors – that’s the way to go.

I believe that by continually producing a steady stream of high-quality features, our customer confidence will remain high and our speed to market will be higher than our competitors – that’s the way to go.

Are there any tools, workflows, or engineering practices you consider non-negotiable?

I’m a firm believer in a true CI/CD process (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery). Automated testing, continuous delivery, trunk-based development. I heavily encourage pair programming and TDD (Test-Driven Development), but I don’t require them. Like many tools, they have a place and a time where they are most appropriate, but I expect my team to build confidence in their tools to know when to deploy different strategies.

How are you currently using AI in your day-to-day work—or where do you see it having the biggest impact?

Since I’m currently in my first 30 days at Sixfold, the ability of AI tools to help me summarize documents has been huge. They’re great research assistants and help me answer questions without needing to break someone else out of their focus time.

What’s your favorite productivity trick that has nothing to do with code?

If I need to quickly dial in on a task, I’ll put on a pair of headphones and start up a playlist that consists of nothing but punchy bass-line music with no lyrics. The steady beat puts my brain into a predictable rhythm and the world melts away. I’ll even do this if I’m alone in my home office!

If I need to quickly dial in on a task, I’ll put on a pair of headphones and start up a playlist that consists of nothing but punchy bass-line music with no lyrics. The steady beat puts my brain into a predictable rhythm and the world melts away.

From your perspective, what makes Sixfold stand out—and what excites you most about what we’re building?

Sixfold has cracked the code on how to drive high levels of accuracy on top of the aggregating power of LLMs. We’re taking arguably the hardest problem in the LLM space, building trust, and making it a first-class citizen. It guides everything we do, and it’s exciting to be at the forefront of building high-trust LLM-based systems. I firmly believe this will unlock a number of huge markets that cannot rely on systems that are only right 60% of the time.

Sixfold has cracked the code on how to drive high levels of accuracy on top of the aggregating power of LLMs.