5 Questions with: Mustapha Lahmar, Senior Solutions Engineer

Mustapha Lahmar, Senior Solutions Engineer, joined EvolutionIQ in the summer of 2023. He’s a graduate of Rutgers University and went on to work at two different SaaS companies prior to his current role. His background includes working on data implementations and integrations in client-facing roles. At EvolutionIQ, he particularly enjoys the dog-friendly office environment, and brings his 90-lb shepherd (named Mowgli, after The Jungle Book) to work with him 3 to 4 times a week.

How did your work at previous roles prepare you for the responsibilities of being a Senior Solutions Engineer?

Before EvolutionIQ, I worked at SaaS companies, Gloat and INTURN. This experience directly prepared me for what I’m working on at EvolutionIQ, as they allowed me to see how implementations are done in two different industries–one industry being HR technology and the other inventory technology.

I appreciate the time I spent with both organizations as I saw how implementations are executed in a less than 100 person organization (INTURN) and a 250 person organization (Gloat). With a larger organization, you’re typically working with an established data infrastructure and trying to get it to fit complex client data.

How do you assist in moving the needle forward with EvolutionIQ’s claims guidance system?

I help our clients understand the data required for our claims guidance system to work properly. I’m communicating with them, so we can deliver that data in a timely fashion. With claims guidance, everything needs to be accurate. We’re accounting for all the latest aspects of the claim. If they’re making updates in their system, we want to ensure that those updates are being entered and passed over to us.

I would say that approximately 70% of my time is spent working with clients. Several clients I link up with on a weekly basis, and there are even clients that I meet with twice a week. Client relationships take up a large portion of my time because I’m continuously touching base and managing the technicalities of these connections.

Another way I’m moving the needle forward is with the projects I’m overseeing. Right now I’m focused on a major integration for an insurance technology company, and I’m involved with a financial service company’s implementation of our core module.

What’s the office culture like at EvolutionIQ? What can you expect to see when you come into the office?

It’s friendly, focused, and high energy. At EvolutionIQ, there’s a real sense that people want to get to know you, and it feels like your coworkers care equally about getting to know you personally as they do about moving the needle forward on projects.

In my experience, relationships here happen naturally. I will go from talking with a coworker about clients and products to talking about weekend plans. The rapport is fluid, which is nice because it breaks up the seriousness of the work. It’s also a typical start-up culture where we are very well-fed and have fostered a sense of community. People bring in baked goods or other food items from home, and we celebrate each other’s accomplishments professionally and personally.

What’s new for me is that EvolutionIQ staff are commonly taking part in athletic events together, which I had not done at previous companies. I joined some of my colleagues here for a Spartan Race and ran a 5K. It’s interesting to have these options and activities for team building as opposed to just company happy hours, although we have those too.

Tell me about a typical day in your role. What are some of the problems you are solving and how do you measure success?

First, I check in with client-specific Slack channels. I’m looking out for things that need my input from the night before. I go through client requests I’m actively working on for data onboardings. I want to make sure that there aren’t any blocks when it comes to ingesting client data. I also need to understand the impact we had the week before in order to know where we are with various project timelines.

Another part of my role is that I work directly with internal teams. My team is actively looking at ways to leverage AI and machine learning to better understand our clients raw data prior to it being ingested and mapped into our system.

I consider myself to be a connecting tissue to the engineers that are working on building the pipeline for our data. The rest of my time, I’m working on integrations. It’s really a combination of talking to clients and internal team members and then focusing on building out technical development efforts we have specific for our team.

I measure success by asking the right data questions. I’m careful to make sure that our clients have accurate data within our systems for the claims guidance we provide. If a client is having a perfect data flow through our system and generates claim guidance, that’s a successful implementation. Another metric is timing. Are we doing implementations in a timely fashion? I want to make sure client data is up and running on the platform as quickly as possible.

What makes EvolutionIQ a great place to work?

I trust my colleagues to be responsible and motivated to truly care about the work, and I know they’re capable and willing to put in the effort required to work through complex scenarios or situations. I’ve created some pretty good friends in my time at EvolutionIQ. It’s not necessary to have friends where you work, but it’s a bonus. I really like the people I work with, and we’re able to go from having a serious conversation from a work perspective to going out to eat and socializing.

We’re already really great at what we do in the group disability space, and we’re going to be even better going forward. I think we’re going to see our investment and focus in the disability space pay dividends. Particularly in terms of everything we’re doing today in terms of operations and focusing on how we’re going to scale.

What is the tone set by the leadership team?

The leadership team sets a tone that’s accountable and trustworthy.  They are aware of being the face of EvolutionIQ as a client services organization. There’s a lot of transparency, as we need to be accountable to our clients. Across the organization, we care about clients’ implementations as much as the client does, and we listen to their pain points. Our organization is the face of the client internally, and we want to make sure we’re taking in everything from our clients and putting our best foot forward with them.

EvolutionIQ is well-formulated, and I expect it will grow to be a larger company that can take on anything from the insurance space.

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