One Week at Edge: The Job I Almost Thought Was a Scam
I am one week into a new job at Edge Payment Technologies, and I want to write down how it happened before the details blur, because for a while I was not sure it was real.
A message out of nowhere
I was deep in work on GivingFire, upgrading its Rails app to RC2, when a LinkedIn message arrived from Dega Gebre, Edge's COO. We set up a call, and it was short. Then a second call was arranged with Alexic Smith, and that one was short too.
Both calls took less than five minutes.
If you have spent any time on LinkedIn, you know where my mind went. A message out of the blue, a couple of very quick calls, and a job offer taking shape faster than any hiring process I had been through. It had a lot in common with the recruitment scams people warn about. I spent more time than I would like to admit wondering whether I was being set up.
I wasn't. Things simply move fast at Edge, and the people there knew what they needed.
What I'm building
Edge is building a payment gateway for high-risk merchants, written in Rails, with RS2 as our processing partner and Chesapeake Bank as the sponsor bank.
And it is moving quickly. We are heading into pre-production validation, and the app is not ready yet. That makes for a busy first week, but also an exciting one: there is real work to do, it matters, and there is no time to ease in slowly.
A confession
A small one. Alexic's name is pronounced Alex. I learned that a week into the job. I had been getting it wrong until then, so if you are reading this, Alexic, I'm sorry, and thank you for being gracious about it.
Why I'm excited
Moving from GivingFire to Edge feels like a natural next step. GivingFire got me into fintech, and Edge takes me further into it: from giving platforms to the payment rails underneath them, with sponsor banks, processors, compliance and risk all in the picture.
What makes it special, though, is how it happened. I didn't go looking for this job. It found me. After years of the usual ways of finding work, having the right role arrive in my inbox is something I don't take for granted.
My advice from this experience: be careful with unexpected job offers, because the scams are real. But don't be so suspicious that you miss the real ones. Check who you are talking to, ask questions, and sometimes the five-minute call really is the start of something good.
One week down. Let's get this gateway to production.