Qualys

I was at Qualys for 7 years so I have a pretty good idea of where the company came from and where it is headed. I was there pre-IPO and I have seen its evolution from a small-size startup company to a mature international industry leader.

Qualys is a company that focuses on its products first. It took a huge bet on Cloud Security before it was even a thing and was able to take a huge lead on its competitors. This resulted in the company creating an amazing cloud-first architecture that was able to scale up to millions of scans per day with almost no false positive. It also allowed the company to secure early on a wide variety of customers, from the most prestigious Fortune-100s banks to smaller companies that wanted to secure their networks. With the years, the company's success kept being reflected by its steady and consistent growth, its financial security, and its continuous investment in expanding to new services and products while keeping a huge focus on product quality.

I am from Engineering and over 7 years evolved from being a Software Engineer to a Director of Engineering. Every single time I have suggested new ideas or shown a desire to implement new ways to improve the architecture, I was greeted with enthusiasm and freedom to do so by my peers and managers. Showing initiative has always paid off, and I was always credited with the extra work that I provided. This was always done with the product in mind, and there were plenty of other people around me who were rewarded for their hard work. The architecture came with plenty of fascinating technical challenges: we migrated the entire front-end stack from ExtJS to ReactJS, using the latest tech such as ES6 (w/babel) or webpack.

The backend is currently evolving from a monolith to a micro-services architecture that relies on an amazing stack (Kafka for messaging, Cassandra/ElasticSearch for non-SQL storage, Redis, etc.) allowing the new services to scale autonomously. This transition has been extremely complex and has been very challenging from all sides. It has required a transformation of the ops team, the devops team and the engineering team. All of this is done amongst very bright engineers who are driven by the passion to produce good code and great products. Engineering-wise, I can promise you that Qualys will provide you with the best opportunity for growth and challenges, while keeping the flexibility of a startup.

Benefits-wise, Qualys has come a long way over the years to match some of the best tech companies out there, which include really good pay and year bumps, company-wise bonuses, RSUs with stocks whose value has doubled over the past 15 months, 401K matching, and the most amazing health benefits, for which I am going to pay 3 times that amount for the same coverage at Google.

Overall, Qualys is an amazing company to work for, and I have learned and grown so much throughout the years that I have spent there. The direction it is currently taking, with a high investment in a new cutting-edge architecture, mingled with its current position in the market will make the company the leader in the security business. As more and more people are moving to the Cloud, I believe that Qualys will dominate the market in the years to come.

With so many products and moving parts, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and lose vision of the big picture.

Reinforce the product team, don't hesitate to over-communicate repeatedly the global vision and position of Qualys in the market.