Get to know Matt Quirion, Kion’s new director of design and engineering

Finding great tech talent in the current hiring market can feel a bit like chasing a cloud — by the time you start pursuing it, it’s most likely drifted out of reach. Lucky for the team at Kion, Matt Quirion found them, no chasing necessary.

Quirion, an industry veteran with decades of experience, first learned about Kion (then called cloudtamer.io) by chance, drawn to the company’s Technical.ly Culture Page through an ad on the site. Kion has used Technical.ly’s Talent Pro platform since 2020 to raise awareness of the company and its solution, share information about its workplace culture and post its open roles. After reading up on the company, Quirion immediately decided he was either going to become a customer or an employee.

That led to him applying to the director of design and engineering role here on Technical.ly’s job board, and a short time later, he joined the remote-first team. We reached out to learn more about his experience so far and what excites him about Kion’s future.

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What is your current role, and what are your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities like?

As the director of design and engineering at Kion, I lead our product engineering, design, DevOps and QA teams, and report to our CTO, Joe Spurrier. I spend my time working on coordination between our team leads, helping my people manage their career paths, planning out work for our various teams and strategizing on product or process. And sometimes I’ll find a way to stick my hands in some code just to keep up with it.

What was your background before joining Kion?

I’ve spent over 20 years building software. The last 12 years, I’ve spent it building SaaS products in various roles from lead UI engineer to VP of product and then a couple of director of engineering roles. I’ve been in companies as large as IBM and so small that I was “engineer #1.” Before Kion, I was director of product engineering at STAQ, which was acquired in the spring of 2021.

How would you describe the work environment and culture at Kion?

We are a remote-first company, and that really filters into everything we do and everything we are. We manage to have a lot of fun while working very hard. The entire organization is highly collaborative. We’re still the size where everyone at Kion knows your name by your second week at the company, but you can feel the growth and opportunity every day.  Though we all work remotely, there is no shortage of inside-Kion jokes and memes. We have monthly lunch-and-learns that, just in my time at Kion, have taught me about home sound systems and headphones, user experience and the psychology behind it, Kubernetes, and next month we’ll be learning about home pizza making.

What are you excited about most in your new role?

The product itself. Having spent so much time developing software that runs on the cloud, once I learned about a local company making a cloud enablement platform, I recognized the market’s need immediately.

What interests/hobbies/activities do you enjoy outside of work?

I’m not a great runner, but I do run consistently. I ran my first half-marathon in 15 years back in December. I also try to find any excuse I can to either golf or at least be hitting golf balls. And if the weather doesn’t cooperate, I love to play video games with my kids, though I’m terrible at all of them.

What part did Technical.ly play in your job search?

Actually, I was searching through Technical.ly’s job listings last summer, looking for a potential role for a former engineer of mine, and noticed an ad in the sidebar for something called cloudtamer (Kion’s former brand name). I clicked on it to find out what the heck cloudtamer was. Thirty minutes later I decided I was either going to convince my CTO that we needed the product, or I was going to go work for that company. A month later, I started my first day at Kion.

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