Sine is thrilled to welcome Matt Bauerochse to the team as VP of Engineering.
Matt has been no stranger to Sine over the years and, in fact, played a crucial role in the company’s inception.
We caught up with Matt to find out more about his journey so far and a look at what the future holds for Sine.
So this actually isn’t your first involvement with Sine, can you tell us a bit more about how you first got involved with the company?
It was around November of 2013 that I first came in contact with Sine. Antony reached out about developing an app for his startup idea when he moved back into Adelaide. He was pretty excited and looking for Adelaide based developers to canvas the ideas.
He took us through some slides and we thought it was a really solid idea. After some further discovery sessions, we went and built the first MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
It was really just a race at first. Pushing new features out every week while Antony was visiting schools and selling the product. We were trying different things and it was a really exciting time.
The demand for Sine continued to grow and our agency was growing and we kept hiring more people. There was a point that there was just such demand for the product that Sine really needed scale out to the next phase of their development.
Eventually, Sine started to build its own team and get them up to speed to take over and start architecting the backend for themselves to continue pushing the company into its next phase.
You kept very busy after that time as well though, I understand. Where has your career taken you since those early days with Sine?
My agency kept plugging along and we started to take on some government projects. I also continued to work on a number of projects in the defence space. I’d been in that area since around 2007 and those projects always presented such unique challenges.
What can you tell us about your new role with Sine?
It’s a role that I’m really excited about and something where I feel I can make a big difference. Sine is in an amazing position and I can bring my experiences over the years to help Sine scale and grow to the next level.
In my role now I’ll be leading the engineering teams, supporting Matt Crisp (CTO) and also be involved in the solution architecture where I can leverage my experience in identity and defence to help Sine scale and tackle those challenges.
From the identity perspective, there’s a lot of interesting things in terms of how a digital approach to identity can integrate with check-ins for workplace management and in defence, there’s a lot of security elements that are really important for businesses in the modern environment and really are just crucial to ensure these workplace management systems are robust and secure enough to support modern enterprise.
How have you found it coming back into the company and to see where the solution is now compared to where that first MVP started?
The solution started out as a minimum set of features. You know, it was an iPad at the reception desk to take the place of a paper sign-in book, but throughout that time there’s been feedback from clients and the solution has just continued to scale, evolve and adapt to tackle different areas and provide new solutions.
When Sine began to scale its own team, I think there were 6 or 7 employees at Sine and now to step back in today and see how it’s grown is just so exciting.
I’ve had a lot of catchups with the engineering teams and there’s so much talent in those teams – it’s a real testament to the leadership and recruitment that’s taken place to date.
There’s also a really great culture, and I think that’s been a constant since those early days. It’s a great culture to be a part of and it’s something that you really feel from the moment you step in. Everyone works together, they have a good time but they’re also so driven by a passion to deliver a product that is customer focussed and driven by a commitment to innovation.
What does the future look like for you and Sine?
I think it’s going to be a really exciting period for Sine. We’re currently growing 50% year on year and a lot of that is coming off the back of the engineering talent that we continue to bring in. We have senior engineers joining and bringing support to our product owners as well as myself and Matt Crisp, so that’s opening a lot of doors for how we can continue developing the Sine platform to provide an industry-leading product.
