6 Questions with Andy Caruso, our Head of Engineering
Name: Andy Caruso
Title: Head of Engineering
Office: Palo Alto
Our head of engineering, Andy Caruso, is a wizard at all things cloud infrastructure: performance, security, compliance, and more. He spends his days orchestrating our world-class team of engineers to iterate on and enhance our data platform. Get to know more about him in our interview below:
Could you tell us a little bit about your background? Where were you before this role?
Prior to working at Ganymede, I was building a self-service cloud infrastructure platform at Verily, which had me thinking a lot about how to best use the cloud in various life science contexts.
Before that, I was working on an implanted neurostimulator platform in a joint venture between GSK and Verily. The rest of my career has been using my computer engineering degree to ship things fast (YouTube mobile) and slow (implantable pacemakers).
What made you decide to come to Ganymede?
The opportunity to have an impact inside a bio lab. In building medical devices, there's a lot of work that requires lab space (testing equipment, mechanical fixtures, etc) and there's always an innovative energy. Knowing how vibrant and active the biotech space is right now, it's incredibly exciting to build data infrastructure to advance lab work.
How was your first year here? Any favorite memories?
Seeing the different parts of the platform come into place has been such a rewarding experience, and hearing the reactions of our users has been gratifying. It's very humbling to have such a talented team of people working on a solution that automates lab data and makes work easier for scientists. The excitement and creative ideas are contagious.
Which technological or scientific innovations are you most excited about?
AI code generation holds a ton of potential for my day-to-day life. Additionally, the maturation and automation of biomanufacturing is going to reshape the way the world manages disease.
What’s one common misconception, misunderstanding, or misused technology in your work?
My pet peeve is when people think that "Compliance is hard, we should just avoid it." I've found the responses and questions from the FDA to be far more reasonable and tractable than the reasons given for disallowing the release of a new mobile app version. Compliance and quality are a part of a culture.Teams that organize around those principles are far more effective in the long-term.
If you could give one piece of advice to anyone looking to break into the intersection of biotech and tech, what would it be?
Plan for iteration. In standard software development, agile processes embrace iteration and use it as an opportunity to repeat and refine common processes. Mapping the ideas of iteration, reflection, and improvement on to other processes can illuminate missing information and can eliminate the surprise factor of needing another iteration, if not the additional iteration entirely.
