Spotlight: Paul Kim

Role: Director of UI Engineering

Hire Date: February 2012

Previous experience: Yahoo! Netflix

Fun facts: Two patents at Yahoo! Was Giants’ relief pitcher Sergio Romo for Halloween

“Being at Chegg… it really comes down to the people. It’s a great mix of talent you can learn from, take those experiences and turn them into something that’s memorable.”

What does your team do?

The UI Engineering team partners with product, design, back office engineering, business intelligence and the other various teams within Chegg to deliver new features and improvements to our commerce, search, personalization, and customer service flows. We’re responsible for the majority of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP code on the site.

Where were you before Chegg?

A little company called Netflix, if you can call 500 employees at the time, “little”. Initially, I lead Customer Service Engineering (CSE) and managed the full application stack for our call centers. and later seized the opportunity to lead the UI Engineering team for Netflix and the infamous Qwikster.

Why did you choose to come to Chegg?

Primarily because of the people, but equally important is the opportunity to work with the student demographic in the tech education. I really like the space itself and the young minds that are excited about the next cool thing, so being able to learn and discover what that is, is pretty cool.

How would you describe your first year with Chegg?

Busy, challenging, exciting all together!  It’s great to be part of a company that is successful, growing and breaking new ground.

What’s been one of your proudest moments here so far?

One of the biggest projects the Front End team launched was “Simple Site” and it’s basically a new UI architecture for of chegg.com. We wanted to make sure that our students understood the value of Chegg and all the various services we built or acquired over the past couple of years by bringing all of those services to the forefront so students could easily discover them.

How did you get into engineering?

Curiosity. Probably started when I purchased my first computer and started playing games. Took me years to pay it off and parts and service were so expensive, so I had to tinker and hack the system to do any upgrades myself.  It was fascinating! It didn’t take long before I started hacking the software itself and reading various O’Reilly books.

Have any crazy or fun things happen to you since you’ve been here?

Well, I’ve taken the team bowling a few times for our off-sites and the goal hasn’t always been to hit the pins, you can imagine where this leads. It’s been a blast getting out of the office, learning more about everyone and just hanging out.

Have your programming abilities ever been affected by your bowling injuries?

Not yet! Although we had a hackathon recently, you’ll have to check with the other devs on my team.

Did anything surprise you about working here?

Not being constrained by technology. At one of my previous positions, we were so focused on cross-browser and legacy support that it stifled our innovation. At Chegg, we’re dealing with a much younger demographic who are quick to pick up the latest and greatest gadgets and technologies. They’re using modern browsers, which allows our team to build really rich and delightful user experiences.

What fun thing are you working on this week?

An integration project with a massive open online course (MOOC) company. We’re partnering with them to bring our eReader, eTextbooks and other Chegg goodness to their users.

Anything else you want to add?

Being at Chegg has been really fun and exciting and it really comes down to the people. We have people who are super early in their careers like interns and recent graduates fresh out of school and then we have people who are veterans of search, e-commerce, advertising, or community based companies. It’s a great mix of talent you can mentor, teach and learn from, take those experiences and turn them into something that’s memorable.

As a hiring manager, what do you look for when hiring someone?

Passionate, curious, innovative, forward thinkers;  people who aren’t limited to working on task A, B, and C. It’s not just a list of project requirements to tackle. As an end-user, what would be the best solution for me and possibly millions of other end-users.

Fun fact?

I’m on a couple of patents from my days at Yahoo. One was a clutter tool, which determined a website’s clutter rank. You could point it any page and it would leverage various algorithms to generate a clutter score and ranked your website against others it had already scored, it was pretty cool and fun to work on.

What do you do in your free time?

Other than a little downtime with my Netflix, I spend any free time with my kids. They love playing soccer, baseball and softball so we’re  outside working those kicks, catches, and hits so they can get on the field and kick butt!