Behind The Grin – Alon Lipnik

As a co-founder of Grin, and the company’s VP of Engineering, I have an unusual—if not oddly specific—intersection of professional experiences that make me uniquely suited for my role. While I’m a technologist through and through, I grew up steeped in orthodontia due to my family’s orthodontic distributorship business. As a kid and young adult, I watched the steady flow of new technologies enter the field and continually change the profession. However, technology was my calling and I became a software engineer at Cisco Systems. Now at Grin, I combine my oral-care insights with engineering expertise to create all of the tools and platforms for Grin. By prioritizing the latest technology, we allow doctors to virtually reach into their patients’ mouths while bringing patients the convenience they crave.

Strong Technology Base

When designing any new Grin tool, feature, technology, or hardware, I have one thing consistently on my mind: the end-user. The biggest differentiator I instill in my team is to endlessly think about the consumer, and then build products with the most simplistic and best user experience. To offer that, we need sophisticated technology that works hard on the back end so that anyone finds the Grin journey smooth. Our state-of-the-art architecture includes E2E cloud-based platform, serverless computing, fully secure APIs, microservices, and a platform built to scale. To achieve these goals, I construct our team with pedigreed engineers who are equally obsessed with creating user-centric frameworks. That way, our cutting-edge systems never lose sight of the members we are there to serve.

Feedback Loop

Another critical component I instill in my engineering team is to learn from feedback and implement it into new products and system iterations. This not only includes critical insights from Grin doctors and patients but also our ever-expanding stream of data. We are able to be very data-driven by monitoring more than 100K app user events daily. That helps influence all of our design decisions. For example, when our engineering team obtains feedback from end-users, it is now bolstered by our unique insights to make the most durable decisions. When we want to beta test a product, A/B test an idea, solve an issue or create a new feature, we are now able to base our decisions on the data we generated.

Dental Future: A Positive Experience

Oral care sometimes gets a bad rap, and I want to change that with Grin technology. What we are building should excite everyone who uses Grin, and make the dental experience a pleasant one. This includes layering the latest 3D technology, supporting beautiful UX/UI interfaces, and ensuring the platform is always as reliable as possible. Even though Grin is building serious medical tools, I still want everyone who uses it to stop and think ‘wow, this is cool!’

Interested in joining a company that thrives on building excellent technology to make patient-centric solutions? If so, Grin is the place for you – careers.