Rise told him he wanted to build one of Japan’s largest companies.

Ata found Jurin AI through a recruiter. His first call was with our founder Rise.

"Rise was very ambitious. He told me in the first five minutes about wanting to make one of the largest companies out of Japan. Usually when people talk about those kinds of things, it seems made up. But after going through the interview process, it seemed like these people were capable and knew what they were doing."

The strange part was almost nothing online backed any of it up. He didn’t join immediately. He looked at other options, weighed the pros and cons, thought about stability. But this was the one that felt like a real challenge worth throwing himself into.

He interviewed as an engineer. Six months later he became an FDE.

Ata originally joined as a software engineer. But his engineering background combined with being bilingual in English and Japanese pushed him toward a different role that didn't have a clean job title at most companies, Forward Deployed Engineer.

"FDE is pretty integral to Jurin as a company because we do have a product but that product is very advanced and hard to start off with. We need roles that bridge engineering and the customer side. People who are able to talk to both, see what new features customers need, and drive those features to implementation."

Compared to pure engineering, the scope feels different, and pressure comes from different directions too.

"You want to make the customers happy but you also have to know the limits of engineering. You don't want to dump too much work on them and you don't want to dump too much work on yourself. Balancing both sides is hard. Whereas as an engineer, you basically just have to focus on your own work."

If there's an easier way to do it, do it.

One of Ata’s favorite quotes is:

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

"If there's an easier way to get a job done, I'll choose that rather than going through something super manual or time consuming. The important part about the quote is efficiency. If you can do the job in less time with less effort, always choose that path."

A normal week stacks engineering, customer meetings, and sales demos on top of each other.

"On Monday I have a demo to prepare for so I need this feature out by Friday night. With engineering it's always unpredictable, something always comes up. Maybe there's a P0 incident that afternoon. We put out a fix, spend all night working on it. By Tuesday morning everything is fixed. Tuesday afternoon I go in person to a customer meeting to explain a new feature. Thursday there's a sales demo where we pitch our product and try to get a contract. The hardest thing is always getting that next meeting that eventually leads to a contract being signed."

When too many things stack at once, he hands engineering work to the team and focuses on customers. That only works because there’s enough trust in the engineering team.

After all that, he cooks. His cat Louli gets into mischief in the kitchen but he makes do.

Solve the hardest thing, and everything else gets easier.

One of the most useful things Ata learned at Jurin AI came from Rise.

"In the morning, waking up, you should always have a list of things to do. But you look at that list and figure out what your highest priority is and just try to get that done as soon as possible. Once you overcome your biggest obstacle of the day, all other tasks seem a lot easier and a lot more doable. That's helped me tackle this never-ending wave of tasks."

Hardworking + humble beats everything else.

"The people that fit here are just hardworking, humble people. Of course you need to be smart, but if you're not willing to put in the hours and the effort, it's easy for other people in this company to see. Everything is result based. If the work you do is sloppy or not clean, it is pretty easy to notice."

He expected a startup. He didn't expect it to move this fast.

Nine months ago Jurin AI was a group of ten engineers and two salespeople. That's not what it looks like now.

"The growth surprised me. I didn't expect the product to change as much as it did. The team grew very fast. Now we're bigger but we also work a lot more efficiently. Everyone has their role, everyone knows what they're doing."

What that growth looks like from the inside is a product that never sits still.

At my previous company, the product was already pretty built out and stable. We didn't make that many large changes, mostly just modifications to make the customer experience better. Here, ever since the first day, Rise always had some vision in his head of what he wanted Jurin to be. Every new feature, every implementation is just getting closer to that. Every couple of months we have a new product line that Rise wants to go into, we spend a couple weeks implementing it, and now we have a whole new way that customers can use Jurin.

— Ata Numan, Engineering

Ata already knows he’ll never work at a big company again.

"The ideal would be to start my own company. The way I work and personality-wise, I don't think I'd fit in a large company. I'd always stick to small to medium-sized companies."

We’re hiring. Find out more at jurin.ai/career.