Employee Spotlight: Jia Ni

This week, we're speaking with our staff engineer, Jia Ni. We delved into why he joined Truewind, the most fun/challenging parts of his work, and the best career advice he’s ever received.

Meet Jia, Truewind's first engineering hire and a technical powerhouse.

With an impressive background as a software engineer at Bloomberg, an individual contributor and engineering manager at three different startups, and a co-founder of his own tax and accounting startup, Jia brings a wealth of experience and expertise.

His ability to ship quickly, his strong intuition for product development, and his deep empathy for our customers make him an indispensable part of Truewind.

We sat down with Jia to learn more about his day-to-day, what motivates him, and the exciting projects he's working on.

At Truewind, what does your typical day look like?

As a staff engineer, I build products and manage our technical infrastructure.

I also assist with product strategy, roadmap planning, and hiring.

Additionally, I support our enterprise clients as a fractional customer success manager, ensuring their needs are met and that their feedback shapes our product.

Occasionally, I also jump into sales, like at the AICPA conference.

What motivated you to join Truewind?

I really believe there’s a huge opportunity for a vertical B2B SaaS player in the Tax & Accounting space, especially with the rise of GenAI.

That belief was reinforced during my time at the startup I co-founded, which focused on helping T&A firms with practice management.

Plus, I’ve always been passionate about finance and accounting—I even used to do my household’s monthly bookkeeping!

What's the most fun part of your job?

It’s hard to pick, but I’d say building from 0 to 1.

In particular, creating a product, seeing the metrics increase and that sales are being closed.

Those are aspects of the “founding” experience that I really enjoy.

How about the most challenging part of your work?

In the past three months, the biggest challenge has been dealing with uncertainty—both in terms of identifying the right problems to solve, and the order to address them.

Another thing that’s always tricky is settling on the minimum investment to test a hypothesis.

Specifically, when we’re stress-testing the feedback we’ve received from beta clients.

Can you share a project you're working on, and the impact you hope it has for Truewind's customers?

This might get a little technical, but bear with me!

Right now, we’re focused on improving the transaction classification engine’s accuracy.

Recently, we achieved an aggregated prediction accuracy of about 80 percent across all clients for predicting both the “Payee” and “Account.”

However, the standard deviation per client can be as high as 10 percent.

My 3 goals are to: 

• Maintain 80 percent accuracy for clients using Class/Department tagging.

• Hit 90 percent accuracy for those who don’t use Class/Department tagging.

• Reduce the standard deviation so that 90 percent of clients have at least 75-85 percent accuracy.

The impact: our customers would only need to review and correct about 10 percent of transactions each month.

Also, that number would keep decreasing as our system continuously gains more context.

Switching from the work topics, what’s one of your favorite hobbies?

Traveling!

Most recently, my family and I went on a trip to Cancun, Mexico—it was a really wonderful experience.

What's the best life advice you've ever heard?

Remember that your career isn’t linear; it has its ups and downs.

Embrace the twists and turns, keep pushing forward, and you'll find success along the way.

More than anyone, I think Charity Majors has done the best job of wording and conveying that concept. 

She’s the co-founder of Honeycomb, and a phenomenal engineering leader.  

If you could instantly learn any new skill, what would it be?

I’d choose sight-reading music.

I love trying new songs on the piano, but being able to play them right off the sheet without practice is a skill that takes a lot of time to master.

This one’s tough: favorite food?

Italian and Mediterranean cuisine. 

I visited Greece once, and the food was amazing.

Final question! What's the last book you read?

"Atomic Habits" by James Clear.

It made me realize that the principles of habit formation also apply to product design.

By that, I mean developing your product in a way that lowers friction for users, and that makes it easier for them to adopt new behaviors.

Interested in joining Jia and the Truewind team? We’d love to have you! 

Explore our open positions, and let’s shape the future of accounting together.