Curiosity Paves a Colorful Path at LSQ

When Emma Krygowski graduated from the University of Central Florida with a degree in English, a career as a software developer wasn’t part of the plan. Thanks to what she calls being “hyper inquisitive,” however, that’s where Emma finds herself after 11 years at LSQ.

Emma joined LSQ from a temp agency in 2010 after her job with a training company was eliminated. Her first role was in data entry. 

“I started there and basically I am hyper inquisitive; I do not like not knowing things,” she said. “I was constantly obnoxiously asking questions: What is this? What is this for? Why are we doing this? 

“My curiosity was in my favor because they noticed it. I think LSQ is really great at noticing people who are actively curious and interested in things.”

While doing data entry and account management, Emma helped the small software development team. Armed with varied operational expertise, she was then tasked with driving LSQ’s business process redesign initiative to help improve the operations of the company. From there, she became a business analyst, which, according to Emma, was a “catchall for anything on the tech side that was not actually coding. I was doing IT support for a long time: if your mouse was broken, you were talking to me. I was doing data analysis: if you wanted to know how many clients we had in California, I was the person that was writing a SQL query to pull that report for you.”

With her experience growing, Emma’s curiosity led her to an opportunity to become a product manager as LSQ’s technology offerings matured. In this role, she helped stand up LSQ’s supply chain finance platform, a contribution she is very proud of. The opportunity led her into more  interaction with the software development team and actually doing more coding. Straddling both product and development, Emma felt it was time to make a decision as to where she would focus the next stage of her career at LSQ.

She decided, “Yeah, I want to be a developer,” and took her request to her manager who saw her potential and was impressed with her work at every prior stage, and felt she would be a good fit for the role.

Emma is now a top developer at LSQ.

“I mostly work on the front end,” she said, “but I am starting to learn some of the backend. The application is for people who are coming in through factoring and want to factor invoices with us. The application will allow them to do that solely online with some internal pieces for an underwriter or salesperson to communicate back and forth with that prospect.”

Promoting Curiosity and Creativity

Outside of work, Emma is a passionate artist and painter.  

In fact, Emma’s work can be seen inside of work, literally. The office walls of LSQ are splashed with colorful murals, done by her hand.

“We do something called hack week for the tech team where they, for a week, get to take off their normal roadmap and they get to actually just focus on passion projects,” Emma said. “Usually they focus on coding, but for me, I was like, ‘Can I paint on the walls?’ (CEO) Dan (Ambrico) said, ‘Yeah, I want some murals around our values at LSQ.’ He gave us three quotes that he wanted somewhere in some form on the wall and that’s what we got to do.

“That’s something that has kept me here, just the fact that they’re very embracing of creativity – from art to tattoos to colorful hair. They’re very embracing of expanding your wings and figuring out where it takes you and what you like.”

To learn more about the opportunities available to join the LSQ team, visit our careers page.