HER PURPOSE: Born to be a Techie Amanda Schloss Decker ’07 finds fulfillment in both the management and technical sides of engineering. ASHLEY FESTA
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SARAH JACOBS / BUSINESS INSIDER
manda Schloss Decker ’07 says it’s difficult to decide which she enjoys more in her professional life, coding or management. So, sometimes, she just does both. As the director of engineering at One Medical, a membership-based primary care practice, Decker co-manages four teams and nearly 30 people. When she encounters a problem, her expertise in backend coding spurs her to jump in and fix it herself. “It’s also easier to write code in your free time for fun rather than manage people in your free time for fun,” Decker says with a laugh. As a manager, she views her work as a way to help make people’s lives better, respecting employees’ strengths and matching them with projects through which they will excel. She has tried not to commit the errors she has seen some companies make, such as treating engineers like
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spshorae.com Alumni Horae | Issue I 21/22
interchangeable checker pieces. She’d rather emulate her former employer Venmo, which recognized that engineers are more like chess pieces, each with a specialty. Decker was with Venmo for four years, first as an engineer and then as a manager, while her husband, Matt, was in medical school at Columbia. The couple, who met when Decker was an undergraduate at Stanford, eventually headed back to the West Coast, the hub of the tech industry. Gus Ireland ’09 referred Decker to his employer, One Medical, and now she leads a team of engineers who maintain the standards for storing and processing clinical patient data, among other projects. As a student at St. Paul’s, her talent and interest in computer engineering exploded – she took every course the School offered on the subject and then forged her own way, mentored by recently retired faculty member Terry Wardrop ’73, through a self-driven computer game programming course. “Amanda was one of my top programming students,” Wardrop says. “She would extrapolate our basic assignments and add on features, and her projects were always impressively successful. She became a real role model for how to pursue solutions to simple and eventual societal problems.” Decker comes across her love of coding and computers honestly. “It’s my parents’ fault,” she jokes, “they’re both techies.” Her parents have helped provide other St. Paul’s students the opportunity to delve deeper into computer engineering. In 2010, Decker’s father and then president of the SPS Board of Trustees Douglas Schloss ’77, along with former president Jim Kinnear ’46, worked to expand what is now known as the Applied Science and Engineering Program (ASEP), through which students are engaged in a project-based STEM curriculum that prepares them for top science programs. After SPS and Stanford, Decker’s path has spanned the continent, and as a woman in a male-dominated field with a decade of experience, she encourages students, particularly the girls, to find mentors — and to persist, despite the challenges. “Don’t be intimidated,” she says. “Computer science is hard — but also fun.”