--- url: "https://www.skedulo.com/blog/faces-of-skedulo-jess-ahrens" type: "blogPost" title: "Faces of Skedulo: Jess Ahrens" author: "Craig Panigiris" date: "2022-01-14" --- # Faces of Skedulo: Jess Ahrens ### People are the heart of Skedulo, and success—for us, our team and our customers—is a collaborative effort. We are proud of our team's achievements and celebrate them every month with our Skedgend Awards. A Skedgend is a teammate who has been nominated by their peers for consistently demonstrating excellence in our values: In this series, we share the personal stories of our valued Skedgends who work on the frontline and behind the scenes to help make Skedulo a success. ## Jess Ahrens, Senior Software Engineer, based in London | Skedgend Award Winner, November 2021 ### How long have you been with Skedulo? I’ve been at Skedulo for almost 5 years now. ### Why did you choose to work with Skedulo? I had just come out of university and was looking for a role. A recruiter introduced me to Skedulo and, when I went for my interview, they said I didn’t need to wear a suit because everybody would just be wearing t-shirts. I thought that fit my vibe perfectly! ### What’s your favorite thing about your role with Skedulo? For me, the greatest thing about Skedulo is the opportunities it gives to all of its employees; especially on the engineering side. I honestly love being able to work on really interesting and mostly Greenfields projects, and exploring new spaces we are yet to explore. ### Have you ever nominated someone for the Skedgend Award and why? I have nominated a colleague of mine. I think to be a Skedgend you need to be very open with everyone because transparency is huge at Skedulo. And you just need to be honest about your work. ### How did winning the Skedgend Award make you feel? I really appreciate winning the Skedgend award. It feels great to get recognition from everyone. ### What company value did you win the Skedgend award for? I believe _Fearless Together_ and _No Shenanigans_. _Fearless Together_ applies to me because there are many cases where I help with customer escalations. But we get through it as a team, and thankfully everyone I work with is a big team player. ### What motivates you to work hard? The projects motivate me the most. I find them really interesting. Especially working in the product space, developing new and exciting features is something that really gets me going. ### What’s your proudest accomplishment at Skedulo? Probably the continuity of projects when we’ve had other people move on to different projects. They’ve fallen into my hands, but I feel like we’ve been able to make a lot of progress under my supervision. ### What’s been the biggest surprise about working at Skedulo? The biggest surprise was that when I first joined, I didn’t know Skedulo was part of the start-up culture. So coming in and seeing a kitchen with free drinks and free food was jaw dropping! Also, we have a lot of drummers here. I’m a drummer, Matt (our CEO) is also a drummer. Dave on the design team is a drummer. Ricky from support is a drummer. There are others too...we should start a band! ### What are you most excited about for the future? Being an Australian I’m pretty excited for the UK summer. I’ve only been here 3 months so I haven’t seen summer yet. ### How does being at Skedulo allow you to be your best self? I can be my best self because of all the opportunities at Skedulo. I have grown in so many ways and learned so much in the 5 years I’ve been here. ### What is a fact about you that nobody else knows? When I was in university, I was in a progressive metal band. We toured on the east coast of Australia. We were called Mouth of Kala, which is a song name from a band named Gojira which we were big fans of at the time.