The Merit Core Team Grows by 50%!

The Merit Core Team Grows!

We are very proud to announce four awesome new additions to the Merit Core Team. This is a very significant milestone for us because we are so very focused on the creation of great software. Further, we take the quality, caliber, and cultural fit of talent very seriously here at Merit. So, finding even one person that is a great fit can be both difficult and time consuming.

What we were looking for

In this phase of recruiting, we’ve been particularly-focused on a couple core skills and qualities.

• Product-Centricity - It’s one thing to hire technically-strong engineers. It is another thing to find strong engineers that care deeply about the manifestation of the product. And that’s what we look for. Why? Because Merit is open-sourced and heavily-driven by the community. We want people that not just want to create great software, but want to actively engage with the community to make the product better every day.
• A love of Algorithms and Data - The Merit community continues to grow every day, despite our lack of marketing. So it’s important that we are constantly creating great ways to visualize and understand the growth and the ecosystem.
• High-velocity - We absolutely believe that one can write great code quickly. Trading quality for speed is often a false-choice, especially for people with experience, pattern-recognition, and great architectural thinking.

Who we brought on, and what they’ll work on

We brought on four awesome people, each with different backgrounds, experiences and strengths.

![Jason Givens][jason-givens] [jason-givens]: /uploads/2018/06/jasong.jpg#center “Jason Givens” Jason Givens is joining the core team as a Product Lead. This role is all about ‘being on the field’ and helping drive the creation of great software. It means rolling up sleeves and writing excellent code in addition to being sure that other members of his team are on the right track also. It means thinking through the manifestation of the product and honing in on what is best for the user.

![Louis Koester][louis-koester] [louis-koester]: /uploads/2018/06/louisk.jpg#center “Louis Koester” Louis Koester is joining the core team as a Senior Engineer, alongside Jason. He is working across the stack, namely on JavaScript and GoLang to make transacting with Merit easier. He has also been digging deeper on data visualization. The project is top-secret for now, but will be announced some day soon.

![Alex Brown][alex-brown] [alex-brown]: /uploads/2018/06/alexmb.jpg#center “Alex Brown” Alex Brown is joining the core team as a Senior Engineer, alongside Jason and Louis. He is working across the stack also, in JavaScript and GoLang primarily. He is working on driving some exciting new commerce-related APIs that we cannot announce details about quite yet. Stay tuned!

![Andrew Zhuravchak][andrew-zuravchak] [andrew-zuravchak]: /uploads/2018/06/andrewz.jpg#center “Andrew Zhuravchak” Andrew Zhuravchak is joining the core team as an Engineer. He comes to us with experience working on machine learning and complex algorithms. He is leveraging that experience at Merit to help us create efficient and effective mining code. He is starting with hardening the Merit GPU miner and getting it ready fo release. Next up will be improvements to the core protocol.

Onward and Upward!

Merit takes hiring seriously. We know that hiring for its own sake can be dangerous – and that’s why we work aggressively to find people that are an excellent fit here. And we’re just beginning. Know someone who would be a great fit here? Would you be a great fit yourself? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hello@merit.me!