Senior Engineering Manager and Branch comedian Ahmed Nawar has been with us for seven years. We asked him about his experience on the engineering team, what it’s been like to grow here, and what makes Branch different from other employers. We were blown away with his fun, honest, and insightful answers.
What’s the best part of your role?
Being able to improve something, internal or external, at a large scale. Branch is a core piece of infrastructure in some of the world’s largest apps, and improving that user experience every day is very empowering. Internally, I find it immensely satisfying whenever we improve how we work as a team so we can ship a better product to customers, and we have fun doing it.
What do you value most about your coworkers?
Humility and drive. I work with really smart people. At the same time, everyone is generous with their time — they help me whenever I need it. The other aspect that I value is how motivated everyone is to win as a group and cement Branch as one of the great tech companies of the future.
What’s something fun about you people might not know?
I do standup comedy. I started right before the pandemic, so to keep the momentum going, I created an email newsletter to send my sets to friends. This forced me to write material even if I couldn’t perform live. Now I do a mix of live performances at Branch or in my community, and I continue to write bits and jokes in my newsletter.
How have you grown at Branch?
I owe my career to Branch because of the crazy growth I have seen. In 7 years, I’ve been promoted from Support Engineer all the way to Senior Engineering Manager, and that’s because of the growth mindset that Branch lives every day. The biggest value I have learned working here, which also seeped into my personal life, is grit. A door will ultimately open if you care enough to spend the time and energy banging on enough doors.
What do you love most about working in the tech industry?
I love how exciting it is to build really powerful tools quickly and with only human capital. Creating something from scratch that other people use and love is almost magic, and software enables that at a really large scale. It still blows my mind that all of this is possible with just hitting some plastic buttons in a specific order many times each day.
What made you choose to work at Branch, and what makes Branch different from other places you’ve worked?
I really liked the people I interviewed with. They were all smart, driven, and humble. I thought, even if this company tanks in a year or two, at least I would have worked with really good people and that is what matters. Luckily, I’ve gotten the culture I fell in love with and seven years of incredible growth. I was also impressed with how organized and fast the interview process was. To me, it was a window into how Branch operates, and I found it to be accurate after I joined. We continue to move incredibly fast.