By Ocient Staff
Ocient is comprised of talented and ambitious individuals who continue to redefine innovation at hyperscale. Our employee spotlights highlight a sample of these bright minds. In our latest spotlight, we feature Ellis Saupe, a Developer on the Virtual Machine/Optimizer Team. Ellis has been an integral part in pushing important projects over the line during his last few months at Ocient, and now we get to know him a bit better personally and professionally.
He has a multitude of different responsibilities that range from adding grammar to random SQL generator test tools to making Ocient’s in-memory representation of table data significantly more efficient. His involvement in the development of Ocient can be further explored below.
Where are you based and how do you take advantage of our remote first policy?
I’m currently based in St Louis, Missouri. I spent six months last year traveling to visit family and friends, including staying in Germany for a month. It was kind of like taking a gap year, except I was still able to work as I moved around.
How many years have you been at Ocient?
I’ve been working at Ocient full-time for a year and a half now. However, I started out at Ocient with a three-month internship prior to my full-time position.
What are some things you like to do in your free time?
I play ultimate frisbee just often enough to ruin my disc golf throws and disc golf just often enough to ruin my ultimate throws.
What do you find unique about working at Ocient?
Ocient is still at the interesting point of being a new company in an extremely competitive field. Ocient is new enough that I get to work on a ton of different parts of the database and learn about them, but old enough that the product is well beyond a messy prototype. I think it’s crazy that I’m straight out of college and heavily involved in developing a product that competes with giant tech companies.
What advice would you give to someone entering the tech industry?
I think asking me for advice might be a bit like getting advice from someone who won the lottery; I mostly just got lucky and ended up with an internship at a cool database company. For a developer straight out of college, it makes a huge difference if you are a nerd and actually interested in the tech you are working with. I definitely get the impression that most of the people here are solving problems with the database because they find the problems intrinsically interesting rather than just grinding them out because it is their job.
Would you like to give an employee shoutout to someone at Ocient who has inspired you or helped you out along the way?
Outside of all the much more important things Andrew Park does, he reviews pretty much all of my code and keeps me from ever being lazy with my work.
Interested in learning more? Come join the team!
We’re a remote-first company looking for craft-driven contributors. We are passionate about helping our clients harness the power of hyperscale data analytics solutions to improve their business while providing our employees with the tools they need to advance in their careers. If you want to work with a team committed to making an impact, explore our open jobs or check out our partnership opportunities.