Women of Verkada Spotlight Series: Samantha Cho, Software Engineer on the Alarms and Intrusion Team

This is the second post of our Women of Verkada Spotlight Series highlighting just a few of the talented and inspiring women who make up our team. In this post, we’ll introduce you to Samantha Cho, a Software Engineer on our Alarms and Intrusion team. We'll learn more about her role at Verkada, her advice for women starting out in their engineering careers and what she loves most about her work. 

Samantha, tell us a little bit about your role and what you do at Verkada.

One of my favorite parts about working on the Alarms team is that it's a pretty small team, so you get a lot of exposure to different parts of the stack. For example, I work primarily on embedded software, like our Linux distribution and device code. However, I still get to do some backend engineering when the project calls for it, so I get to experience more aspects of the engineering function, which is really cool early in my career. Because it is a smaller team, that also means I get to work very closely with all of my teammates, including some very senior engineers who I have been able to learn from in my time here. 

Another thing that makes this team and Verkada special is having the opportunity to work on a product from the beginning to the launch to seeing our customers adopt it. I got to build all the backend and the firmware for a product while working very closely with our hardware team. 

What advice would you give to future women engineers?

Be confident and believe in yourself. Remember that it's your skills and hard work that have gotten you to this point in your career. Be proud of the moments when you finish something challenging or launch a new product and recognize that it was your own hard work, learning and contributions to the team that made it happen. 

How do you build a community for women at Verkada?

Our official Women at Verkada and Women in Engineering communities have been super helpful in connecting with women within Verkada and the engineering org. The groups fund team lunches and other events that provide a space to get to know each other and share common experiences. It's been exciting to see these organizations grow over the years as we hire more and more people. 

Why do you think someone should apply to Verkada?

It's a unique opportunity to work on something growing so quickly. When I first joined Verkada, the whole company was made up of about 300 people, and now we've grown to 1,600 employees. It's so cool to see how we've grown in all facets - we've released new product lines, new verticals and helped more and more customers. Because we are expanding our product suite so quickly, there's always something new and exciting to build or work on. For example, I started on the Cameras team, and when I wanted to try something different, I had the opportunity to move to the Alarms team and challenge myself with something new.

Want to build products that help keep people safe? Apply today!