Employee Spotlight: Jerry Gregoire
Tell us about yourself and how long you’ve been with Optimal Dynamics.
I started working with Optimal Dynamics in October of 2024. I’ve been working in technology, software, and data engineering for over 20 years. Before joining the team here I worked with another enterprise SaaS company as we made the transition through the start-up and scale-up phases, and in IT roles in Fortune 500 companies before that. I currently live in Austin, Texas with my wife and our two Bernedoodles but my origin and sports team loyalties lie in Kansas City.
Can you briefly summarize your job?
I lead our Product Engineering teams. We are responsible for the front-end and back-end components of our product. This includes our web-based user interfaces and the internal APIs supporting our Dispatching, Strategic Planning, and Load Optimization tools. We work closely with our partners on our Product Management, Analytics, and Customer Success teams to develop, deploy, and support features and functionality that enable our customers to transform and optimize their businesses.
What inspired you the most to join Optimal Dynamics?
As a computer science nerd, I was attracted to the fact that the problems we are tackling here are truly fascinating and classical optimization challenges. These are the kinds of problems that lie at the heart of computer science, machine learning and algorithms.
As a technology professional, I was excited to join a company that is continuously growing and maturing in its practices and processes as it scales to efficiently serve the needs of a growing number of customers and a growing number of use cases.
What do you like best about our company culture?
I like how smart everyone is and the amount of ingenuity and fearlessness people bring to their approaches to do the work. The continuous drive to "always get better and get smarter" is key, and the fact that learning is deeply valued here creates an environment where everyone can grow.
What is unique about what we do at Optimal Dynamics?
We are solving problems and helping people to make decisions using truly novel approaches rooted in a deep understanding of both the theoretical and practical aspects of logistics and dispatching optimization. We are a company that is building real solutions to a real set of problems, and our approach is based on a real understanding of the space.
What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part of the job is getting to work with so many knowledgeable people from so many different disciplines as we envision and plan new and novel features and products for our customers. Digging deep into both what to build, and how best to build it, is exciting and seeing those plans come together into final products is very rewarding.
How does your work impact our product, and, therefore, the industry?
My team and I have a hand in envisioning, designing, planning, building and delivering all of the products in our portfolio. The better we can make the product, the bigger the impact we can have on the quality and efficiency of our customers’ networks and businesses.
What have been your biggest accomplishments on our team, and what was the impact on the company?
One of the biggest impacts I feel that I have had is to help refine our project planning and delivery processes. We have been able to dive deeper into the interdependencies between the various stages and layers of our solution to better understand how best to optimize our own work and how to ensure smooth transitions of work between different teams and stakeholders.
On a more technical note, I have recently been able to use some of the knowledge and experience gained in earlier roles to help identify opportunities to improve efficiency within our own technical stack.
How have you grown professionally while on our team?
I have enjoyed getting the opportunity to learn more about the logistics and trucking industry from the operational perspective. While I have had some prior experience on the shipper and recipient side of this business, the transportation carriers’ business processes wasn’t something I had been exposed to.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I enjoy traveling as much as possible. Some recent trips have been the Tour du Mont Blanc right before I joined the team here, trips with my wife to Italy, Thailand, Singapore, Denmark, Belgium, and The Netherlands, and a hiking trip from coast-to-coast in England along Hadrian’s Wall this past fall.
I also have a workshop below my office at home where I restore old cars (very slowly) and perform other maintenance, repair, and minor fabrication work.
Can you share a hidden talent no one knows about you?
I seem to be extremely good at keeping machines working well beyond their normal, reasonable lifespans. All of my cars are at least 20 years old. I’ve similarly been able to avoid replacing many of the appliances around the house thanks to some (perhaps ill-advised) repair projects.
A more practical, work-related talent may be my ability to think through the various ways a system or solution might be improved to avoid failures before they arise.
What’s the best advice you can give to someone who wants to work at Optimal Dynamics?
Two things: First, apply for a job! We are always looking for gifted, skilled, experienced, and talented people to add to the team here to help us continue to break new ground on the solutions we offer.
Second, bring excitement to learn from the team here already, as well as to learn from your own experiments and imaginative approaches. This is a learning culture and a teaching culture so be prepared to do both!
