Hi, Dani! Can you introduce yourself? What do you like to do outside of work?
I’m Dani Tian, a software engineer at Finley. I spend a lot of my winter snowboarding and enjoy time with my dog, a mini Australian Shepherd. I also love to play video games.
What was your background before joining Finley?
Before joining Finley, I worked at another fintech called Blend for about six years, starting in a jack-of-all-trades role, which included HR, Finance, Operations, and basically anything except Sales or Product Development. The company grew from around 20 people to over 500 people during my time there, allowing me to grow a lot with it.
In my last few years there, I was a business partner for the Product Development side. A lot of those managers told me I would be a great engineer because of the way I think and solve problems. So, after leaving Blend, I took some time off and then entered a coding boot camp called Hack Reactor. That experience started my journey with Finley, where I was hired as the first employee and the first engineer.
How did you end up in the fintech industry?
My degree is in neurobiology from Berkeley, which is completely unrelated to fintech or engineering.
After graduating from Berkeley, I was looking for a practical job to pay off my student loans. Blend had a really great interview process. It was an awesome team and environment. You can imagine a tech startup in San Francisco in the 2010s. It was very much what you see in the Silicon Valley TV show and stuff like that. It was super fun and intense. The office dog really sold it. She was a big Australian shepherd. I ended up getting a similar breed myself just a few years ago. Everyone was working really hard and playing hard, and it was just a fun place to be.
What’s your role at Finley?
I was hired as the first employee and the first engineer here at Finley.
What’s your day-to-day like?
My day-to-day involves not many meetings, which I appreciate. I start by making tea, checking Slack for any overnight issues, and then diving into coding. My day ideally is spent coding and collaborating with our designer and CTO on new product ideas and workflows.
How have your previous experiences influenced your work at Finley?
My last role involved a lot of work around business and people strategy in an ambiguous environment, which has helped me at Finley to quickly switch contexts and juggle multiple priorities. It's very common in a startup software company to have a lot of product requests coming in or a lot of different priorities to juggle at the same time.
There are a lot of general similarities between my last company and this Finley. We’re all about really aligning with the customer's goals and building a product that they love. As an engineer, I interact a lot with our customer success and our capital markets team and hear a lot of the customer's feedback and what they're looking for. I really try to incorporate that into my product development work to make sure that what I'm building actually solves problems that the customers have. We're not creating problems out of nowhere; we’re creating great solutions that customers will love. If we succeed, they succeed. And if they succeed, we succeed.
What do you enjoy most about working at Finley?
The team is my favorite part. Everyone is genuinely kind, helpful, and cooperative. We operate under a "one team" principle, making it a joy to work here because we all have the best intentions and are focused on doing the best for Finley.
What’s an important value in Finley's engineering culture?
Beyond the "one team" value, customer empathy is crucial. Our engineers are product-minded and think about the customers, which is a conscious decision from our CTO to ensure we're building products that solve real problems for our customers.
What can a new hire expect at Finley?
A new hire can expect a lot of help but also a ton of autonomy. We value self-starters who can learn quickly and start contributing meaningful production code in a short time. I would expect to learn a lot very quickly. New engineers on our team typically ramp up quickly, and within a couple of weeks of starting, they contribute actual production code that customers use. It's really great, I think, to be able to feel that impact right away.
Our ability to work well remotely is something special. We have mature, experienced collaborators, so we don’t miss anything from not being in person all the time. Also, the direct exposure engineers get to the business and customer side is unique and something I personally enjoy. I can’t emphasize enough the quality of the talent here, and the humbleness and the collaboration that we have every day, across the board.
Want to learn more about Finley?
Finley is private credit management software that helps private credit borrowers and asset managers streamline and monitor asset-backed loans.
Our software accelerates funding transactions and minimizes risk by automating routine debt capital management tasks like borrowing base reporting, verification, and alerting. For more, check out our Product page.
Interested in learning more about what it’s like to work at Finley? Check out our careers page.
