Employee Spotlight: James Kit Moreland, Ph.D.
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Welcome to the Volt Employee Spotlight Blog Series! We talk a lot about Volt HQ, and we thought this series would be a great way to get to know our amazing and talented team that brings Volt to life. Volt is a special organization, and that is largely due to the team that works on it everyday.
For our first entry into this blog post series, please meet Kit! 👋 Kit joined our company as a Data Scientist about three years ago, but recently transitioned to our engineering team.
What does your job entail?
I work with all things data related at Volt. This has included internal and external research, business analytics/modeling/forecasting, experimental design and statistics for marketing and product, and supplying data to other data stakeholders at the company. More recently, I have had the opportunity to broaden my skillset by joining the engineering team and working on the backend of our software. The backend means that I am still working closer to the database than to the interface of the product.
What is the most interesting part of your job?
Broadly speaking, problem solving. More specifically, I love shaping questions. Something begins as an "I wonder if…” or “ we need to know if…” statement, and then working that into a set of hypotheses that we can find evidence for or against. This is most exciting to me if we then get to run an experiment, but a very close second is figuring out how the data we already have can explore the question. I also very much enjoy communicating the findings to others and including the nuance that often exists in real-world problems. Much of this is mirrored in the engineering role as a "we would like a way for our users to...by building...” statements and the problem-solving of shaping the implementation.
What is a day like at Volt for you?
Recently, a typical day at Volt for me starts out by catching up on the status of various things and planning my day, then checking in with the team at morning standup. From there, I am usually working on some chunk of writing code to support big project initiatives. Two or three times a week, I will be asked an ad hoc data request. This usually involves either figuring out how Amplitude could help answer the question, or writing a custom query against our database.
Kit at Crater Lake, Oregon
What is your favorite place where you have been on vacation?
I had a very beautiful and simple vacation for a long weekend in Scotland in December 2019. I was with one of my closest friends and our partners. We stayed in a converted stone farm outbuilding on a remote hillside. Outside we had a woodfire-heated hot tub and we lucked out with clear skies in a dark sky area. We spent the days walking in the hills and the evenings eating, drinking, hot-tubbing under the stars, and talking by the fire. Perfect.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Strength training (generally powerlifting and strongman oriented), woodwork and reading fiction.
What is your favorite dessert?
Tiramisu.
What would you do if you could do anything for one day?
Does this have to be plausible? I would like to be a good singer for a day and I would do a lot of karaoke (I am not a good singer and will not do karaoke).
What do you love most about Volt?
Our integrity.
Interested in learning more about our open positions at Volt? Check out careers page.
