Shape Your Own Role at Procore

Here at Procore, we don't just embrace change; we drive change! Procore Engineers can shape their own roles and choose to what degree their work affects the company. You drive your own Procore experience.

Today, I’m going to share some stories of Procore Engineers who have successfully individualized their roles. Procore provides Engineers with the autonomy to craft the job of their dreams. This employee-led approach offers numerous benefits, including engagement, innovation, and growth.

I've had the good fortune of joining Procore as an Engineering Manager in mid-2019. Since then, I have been able to increase the scope of my responsibilities steadily. I’ve recently made a significant change—I transitioned from managing a software application development team to building a new Application Infrastructure team. We've been tasked with “making the creation of new services an awesome experience!” The team is focused on evolving Procore’s “Service Creation Guide” to enable developers to launch their own solutions, including an Observability strategy.

I find people-centric efforts extremely rewarding. I’ve also had the opportunity to play an active role in the relaunch of our blog and Women in Tech resource group.

I asked a few co-workers to share their experience in shaping their roles:

Jeff Frost, Database Administration Architect:

After serving as Procore’s VP of Infrastructure for three years, I had a defining moment that led me to re-evaluate and radically reshape my role.

I have a young family, my mother recently passed, and health challenges presented themselves. My professional satisfaction is tied to solving challenging DB problems and staying on top of emerging forms of data storage. I chose the hands-on technical role and decided to let go of management duties. Today, I focus on creating big database performance wins like reducing a reporting query from 90 minutes to 19 milliseconds.

James Dabbs, Principal Engineer:

During one of Sandi Metz' Object-Oriented Design workshops, we identified the stumbling blocks people encountered were often related to two things: the scale of our codebase or a need for more hands-on practice to internalize ideas.

Though I had only started at Procore a few months before, I decided to get involved and be a part of the solution. To help bridge that gap, a few of us formed our own internal refactoring guild. Today, we run regular hands-on workshops, hold standing office hours, and support and mentor Engineers.

We've learned and shared valuable tactics and contributed improvements back to the codebase. I've discussed our findings at RailsConf and on the Ruby Rogues podcast. Procore gave me the flexibility to say, "This problem is important," and make it part of my role, offering me a fantastic opportunity to learn and grow.

Great things happen when people are empowered to forge their own path. Knowing how my colleagues at Procore have crafted their jobs to encourage engagement, innovation, and growth inspires me to continuously expand my horizons.

What inspires you? Consider how you can make it a part of your role.