Øyvind explores ideas for new products that can change the future of the company

From an engineering standpoint, what’s the most exciting thing you’ve done in your life?

My master’s thesis: “Mapping of Chip Designs onto Wafer Scale Emulation Logic.” The task was to determine the feasibility of a wafer-scale logic emulation system capable of emulating tomorrow’s most complex chip designs at high speeds for verification purposes. We created a monstrous chip that’s likely the biggest chip ever made by man. This was unexplored territory, so we had to find engineering solutions on the fly. It was really interesting.

What’s good about working at Medallia?

I work with talented people—among the very best in the world. And I consider them my friends, which is important. You spend most of your time as an adult at work—you need to enjoy what you’re doing. You should have fun.

Also, the management encourages the engineers to put in those extra little finesses that will make the application cooler and faster and better. They are not satisfied with just any product that meets the specifications. They want the engineers to push the limits and create applications that really stand apart from their competitors. It may take a little longer to develop those applications, but they will be cooler from an engineering point of view, and users will have a better experience with them.

Engineering at Medallia: What about it?

We’re creating blazingly fast applications, which give more or less instantaneous responses. That’s one of the company’s advantages. Users access the application all day long and don’t want to wait for it to respond, so the fact that the application is fast and can handle very large amounts of data in a short amount of time means that users will have a better experience and a better workday.

From an engineering point of view, I think it’s fun to develop algorithms and code that are that fast, that allow you to treat such huge amounts of data so rapidly. We use some interesting and novel approaches to databases in order to achieve that—we’re not using traditional databases, but have developed our own OLAP system from scratch.