In this episode of Software Leaders Uncensored, Steve Taplin sits down with Joseph Solomon, Director of Engineering at MyOme, a whole genome sequencing company focused on improving patient outcomes through proactive and diagnostic testing.
Joseph leads a growing engineering team in one of the most complex environments possible, where speed matters, but accuracy is non-negotiable. And his biggest challenge is one that many fast-growing companies are quietly struggling with: making sure engineering can keep up with sales without breaking everything in the process.
The Core Problem: Sales Is Moving Faster Than Engineering
As MyOme grows, the pressure is not just to build. It's to build the right things fast enough to support revenue.
Joseph explains that the engineering backlog is constantly pulled in multiple directions. There are existing customers to support, enterprise integrations to maintain, new customers to onboard, and internal systems to scale. Each of these has competing priorities, and balancing them is where the real difficulty lies.
The risk is clear. If engineering falls behind sales promises, the business starts to crack. Not because the team isn't capable, but because the system isn't designed to scale cleanly yet.
Why HealthTech Changes Everything
Unlike many industries, MyOme operates in a space where being "mostly right" isn't acceptable.
Joseph makes it clear that in healthcare and biotech, accuracy must be absolute. There is no tolerance for error when delivering information to patients or providers. That means every output, whether human or AI-assisted, must go through multiple layers of validation.
This creates a unique tension. The company is moving fast like a startup, deploying multiple times per day, while still maintaining the rigor of a highly regulated environment. That balance is difficult, but it's also a competitive advantage when done well.
The Hidden Bottleneck: Product and Context
One of the most honest insights Joseph shares is that the biggest slowdown isn't always code. It's clarity.
He spends most of his day in meetings with customers, sales, and internal teams. Translating all of that into clear product direction is hard. Sometimes tickets get written with minimal detail, not because of lack of understanding, but because there simply isn't enough time.
That creates friction. Engineers build something, feedback comes in, and iterations increase. The issue isn't capability. It's context not being transferred effectively.
Joseph recognizes that he has become a bottleneck in that translation layer and is actively working to shift more direct communication between engineers and customers so that context flows more naturally.
Scaling Breaks What Once Worked
When the team was small, everything felt fast and efficient. With five or six engineers, communication was simple and decisions were quick.
As the team has grown, new challenges have emerged. PR reviews now involve more opinions, which slows things down. Engineers need more context, which takes time to gather. And onboarding new team members introduces temporary slowdowns before they become productive.
Joseph points out something many leaders eventually realize. Adding engineers does not immediately increase velocity. In fact, it often slows things down first before improving long-term output.
The Monolith Tradeoff
Another source of friction is architectural.
MyOme still operates largely on a monolithic system shared across teams. While it works today, it creates risk. Changes made by one team can impact others, and coordination becomes more complex as the organization grows.
Joseph knows that eventually this will need to evolve, likely toward more decoupled services. But like many startups, the decision isn't just technical. It's about timing, resources, and whether the team is ready to support that shift.
AI Is Changing the Game (Even for Skeptics)
One of the most interesting moments in the conversation is Joseph's shift in perspective on AI.
He openly admits that just weeks ago, he was skeptical. The output didn't feel reliable enough, and it still required too much oversight. But after revisiting it with a real task, his view changed.
He saw high-quality output with minimal interaction, enough to start rethinking how engineering work gets done.
Now, he's encouraging his team to lean into AI more aggressively. Not to replace engineers, but to shift their focus. Instead of spending time typing code, engineers should become experts in context, user experience, and deciding what should or shouldn't be built.
The Real Risk Isn't Technology, It's Misalignment
Joseph also reinforces a theme that comes up repeatedly across engineering organizations.
Product and engineering must be aligned.
He's seen what happens when they are separated under different leadership structures. Priorities diverge. Engineering wants to refactor. Product wants new features. And the result is frustration instead of progress.
At MyOme, bringing product and engineering closer together is already improving alignment, especially as they scale.
What Breaks First If Nothing Changes
Looking ahead, Joseph is clear about where things could fail if the organization doesn't evolve.
The biggest risk is the inability to keep up with sales-driven growth. As enterprise integrations increase and customer demands grow, a small number of engineers handling those interactions becomes a bottleneck.
Beyond that, manual processes like analytics and reporting will start to crack under scale. Without automation, support teams would need to grow linearly with the business, which goes directly against the company's goal of scaling efficiently.
The Philosophy: Scale Without Linear Hiring
One of the most important ideas Joseph shares is how MyOme thinks about growth.
The goal is not to scale by continuously adding headcount. It's to build systems and automation that allow a relatively small team to support exponential growth.
That means constantly identifying manual processes and turning them into automated workflows. It also means making strategic decisions about what to build now versus what to generalize for the future.
Final Takeaway: Trust Is the Foundation
When asked for his most important advice, Joseph doesn't point to tools, processes, or architecture.
He points to trust.
Trust between leadership and engineers. Trust that everyone is doing their best with the information they have. Trust that the team can navigate uncertainty and still move forward.
Because in a fast-growing, high-stakes environment, not everything will be clear. Not everything will be perfect. But with strong trust, teams can adapt, iterate, and solve problems together.
And without it, even the best technical strategy will fall apart.