Ethos Employee Spotlight: Ashwin Pattan

What is your greatest professional accomplishment?

One of the greatest professional accomplishments was the opportunity to build the risk platform for Ethos. This platform is part of the core backbone for Ethos, and being able to work on this platform from inception to transformation into one of the core differentiators for Ethos provides a great sense of accomplishment.

How have you shown leadership in your current role?

I worked on redesigning the eventing framework which involved working with multiple stakeholders and driving decisions to arrive at optimal solutions. Working on this project presented several challenges and great opportunities to enhance and develop a lot of professional skills including negotiation, communication, decision making, first principle thinking, and risk management.

What do you love most about Ethos?

Ethos is focused on its core values, and these values provide a very conducive environment for developing the engineering culture. There is a strong bottoms-up culture that is emphasized by all members of the company. While the company is focused on goals, there is a strong emphasis on engineering quality. This aspect of the company drives innovation and that is what I love the most about Ethos.

Why did you join Ethos?

The leaders’ passion for Ethos during the initial calls made an extremely positive impression on me. Despite being an early startup, their vision and mission statement were well defined, and every leader in the organization base their decisions on these pillars.

This undeterred focus, along with the interesting challenges that exist in the problem space, made the choice real easy for me.

What do you want others to know about Ethos?

Ethos has a strong engineering culture that is unlike any other organization that I have worked at. Every member is an equal contributor to achieve company goals. A high degree of ownership is expected from every member of the organization, and this grants a great responsibility to everyone involved. This brings a sense of success and accomplishment, and that is unique to the culture that Ethos promotes.

Who has been your greatest motivator/ mentor, and how have they impacted you professionally?

To name a single person who has been a great influence on my career would be a hard choice, but the one person that tops the list would be Ankur Mishra. He has led through example and is a great engineering leader to work with. He constantly pushes the boundaries, and brings out the best in every member he works with. He emphasizes first-principle thinking in his everyday decision making process, and pushes all members to follow the same. There is a lot to learn from Ankur, and it’s a great opportunity in my career to work with him and learn from him.

Ashwin Pattan joined Ethos in October 2019 as a software engineer. When Ashwin isn’t building services and redesigning systems at Ethos, he enjoys traveling with family, catching up with friends, cooking or binging on TV shows and movies. Interested in joining Ashwin’s team? Learn more about our career opportunities here.