People portraits: Talking healthcare missions with Nick Mullen, SVP Engineering 

aokechukwu

aokechukwu

In this new series of people portraits, we’ll shine the spotlight on some of the many great Rhomans making Reliance Health such a fantastic place to work. First up to the mic is Nick Mullen, our SVP Engineering!

Read on to learn more about Nick, his motivations and what he looks for from members of his team.

What did you do before joining Reliance Health?

I spent three years working with Babylon and was lucky to spend a lot of time in Rwanda where I got to witness first-hand how access and provision to healthcare works in a rapidly advancing country.

Prior to Babylon, I had co-founded several startup companies, and before that I spent the majority of my career working in telecommunications.

What attracted you to Reliance Health?

Access to healthcare should be a right, not a privilege – and when I first spoke with CEO Femi about the vision for Reliance Health and the intent to bring these services to multiple markets, it was an easy decision to make.

The core mission of making healthcare affordable, accessible, and delightful hit every sweet spot for me.

Nick Mullen
What is the most exciting project you are working on right now?

That is like choosing a favorite child! There are several things underway that all matter for different reasons.

The overhaul we are making to our claims and benefit system is one of the most impactful. We aim to reach a state where our members who seek pre-approval for treatment get it almost instantly. To this end, we’re using high levels of automation and machine-based approvals for simple requests, enabling our staff to concentrate on tasks that will deliver greater value.

Increasing automation in the approval process isn’t just great for customer experience, it also helps control our costs. And this means that our services are within the reach of more people.

Our technical architecture is always under review, and I’m happy to say that we’ve been doing a good job of untangling some of our older and more complex pieces of code. We’ve been breaking our code down into more manageable components. This lets us deploy code faster than ever before. And that code is more reliable and performs better.

We’re currently looking for Engineering Managers to join the team, what do you think is important to succeed in this role?

Communication is always key. Software doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and we need to be in constant communication with our stakeholders so that people know what to expect and when – allowing them to form their own plans around what we release.

Engineering Managers need to be comfortable planning and are expected to know Reliance Health very well – as well as possessing a good understanding of our end-to-end business processes. You will speak daily with your counterparts in the Product team and will know exactly what the long- and short-term plans are.

And of course, Engineering Managers are intended to be the mentors to their team – we believe in hiring people at different levels of experience, and sharing your experiences with more junior members of the team is essential.

You are there as the technical-decision maker, the approver of designs, the producer of delivery plans, the squasher of elusive bugs and the person who pushes our target architecture forward.

Why should people be interested to work as an Engineering Manager at Reliance Health?

I’ll speak to why I enjoy it the most – you get to the impact of what you do almost immediately. There’s absolutely no shortage of ideas, and there are always things we want to improve. Our technology team definitely has a mindset where we want things to be better – and we are empowering our Engineering Managers to get things done. I look at where we are today, compared to when I joined, and I couldn’t be prouder of the progress the team has made.

We’re a fully remote company and intend to stay that way. This means you’re going to work with a really diverse group of developers and colleagues who are distributed across the globe.

Interested in joining Nick’s team? Check out currently available roles here

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