Meet Dennis Kwok, Verkada Senior Firmware Engineer
Tags: Engineering, Software Development, Cameras, Startup, Firmware

Dennis and several racks of R&D cameras

What’s different about working at Verkada?

I’ve worked at other startups before, and there are some things that really stand out about Verkada. First off, they really value the unique experience and perspective that every person brings to the table. I’ve definitely been at places where experience was devalued or they wanted you to do things a certain way, which was detrimental. Also, Verkada is somewhere you can go up to pretty much anyone and talk to them about something they’ve done, and they’ll take the time to explain. You can just be like, “Hey, why is the solution this way? What kind of obstacles were you trying to navigate around?” That’s really helpful, because it may not be apparent from an initial glance why a certain path was followed over another.

“they really value the unique experience and perspective that every person brings to the table”

What’s the hardest problem you recently solved? Who else was involved?

I can still see a few square inches of exposed desk

Probably bringing up our new cameras, which involved the whole team. The new system didn’t have an internal understanding of what motion is, so we had to implement the image processing stuff from scratch in a new environment, based on the model used in the older cameras. That way, to the end user, the experience is consistent from the older to newer models and the cameras yield similar results.

The new cameras were important because we’re always trying to push the limits on how well we can improve the user experience in terms of clarity, resolution, etc. That’s been a major business driver for us. For instance, the old cameras can see pretty well with three megapixels, but the new cameras come in a five and even eight megapixel version — so there’s just way more definition. The drive for “better” is always changing things for us.

Tell me about a big decision you made recently on your own

We recently switched our internal message passing system to something completely different — Protobuf on Zero Message Queue (ZMQ). I had experience with both systems, but no one else on the team had used ZMQ before, so it took a little bit of selling to convince them it was the right solution. The change was really disruptive to the entire ecosystem at the time, and it was intimidating to push for a certain choice with no one else there to vouch for it. But after we got through all the pain of switching, it definitely worked out for us, so that felt good. The amount of ownership here is huge. If you want to work on cool stuff directly, have a big impact, and really get your hands dirty to build something, this is a good place to do it.

“The amount of ownership here is huge”

Who at Verkada has taken a special interest in your success or development?

Dennis keeping his eye on the ball

When I was hired, I was actually one of the people with the most experience, so I wasn’t really expecting to get a lot of mentorship — but I did. Benjamin, one of our co-founders, set up a technical one-on-one for us every other week or so, beginning almost immediately after I joined. We use the time to bounce ideas off of each other and do some cross-experience problem solving over a cup of coffee. And it’s been really, really fruitful. His perspective as a founder and the multitude of things he’s worked on have helped me think about problems in a different way, and I know a lot of the things I’ve suggested to him have made it into his work. It’s been a cool experience.

Interested in joining the Verkada team?

Check out open roles or email questions to recruiting@verkada.com