Crisp Team Spotlight: Eric Takemoto

Since joining Crisp two years ago, Eric Takemoto has worked on multiple engineering projects, helping to build the data platform that hundreds of CPG customers use and enjoy today.

Meet Eric

Role: Software Engineer
Lives in: Salem, Oregon
Favorite grocery store product: Lay’s BBQ potato chips

Starting up at Crisp

Eric Takemoto grew up in Hawaii and attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he studied computer engineering. After moving around, he ultimately settled in Salem, Oregon – a peaceful area surrounded by evergreen trees, only a short drive away from the Oregon coast and city of Portland. 

Before joining Crisp, Eric worked for a larger organization as a Technical Manager, leading a team within defined roadmaps for a long-established product. He describes the experience as steady and “machine-like,” with red-tape boundaries that created a grounded, fail-safe work culture. While this was comfortable, Eric aspired to apply his work to new challenges, and to learn new technologies.

Eric was then recruited by Crisp, and decidedly made the 180º switch from the larger organization to a fast growing tech start-up. He quickly took to Crisp’s dynamic work environment and dove head-first into building functions of the data platform from scratch.

“Here, there’s a lot more freedom to get a solution out the door. Something that really satisfies the business,” Eric describes. Since we’re venturing into a lot of new solutions, there is plenty to work on.” 

Eric went from working within defined guidelines every day, to diving into new projects and helping secure the future-proof foundation of Crisp. As an example, Eric teamed up with Crisp colleague Dan McCabe on the development of our core dashboard designs, making it easy to create sets of them for new connectors as we expand our retail partnerships. 

As a result of uncovering and creating solutions like this from scratch, Eric began to learn new programming languages and expand his technical skill set as he always wanted. The best part was that he had the team’s utmost support and encouragement while doing so.

“I’ve learned infrastructure and deployment, and so many new programming languages very quickly, which is great. I enjoy it!”

Eric Takemoto

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Eric has found that Crisp’s remote work environment helps him deeply focus on projects, while still cultivating collaborative relationships with his teammates.

While interviewing, Eric found the personalities of his prospective colleagues to be one of the biggest draws.

“Everyone is really proud to be here” Eric explains, “they’re knowledgeable, easy to work with, and willing to help at any time.” 

Eric describes his engineering team as having a blameless mindset, always striving for joint success on any project. There are no stupid questions, and there’s no finger pointing. If there is a mistake or something falls through the cracks – which can admittedly happen in a fast paced start-up environment – the team firstly asks “how do we fix this?”, and then “how can we work better to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”

The remote work environment has also served to support Eric’s family – including his wife and three kids – since the ability to focus and accomplish tasks with the support of his team, promotes a healthy work-life balance.

“The culture here is very receptive and understanding about family,” he says.

Ensuring data reliability on the Fetch & Forge team

In his time at Crisp, Eric has been a part of a few different engineering teams, and his efforts are reflected in various parts of the platform. On Fetch & Forge, Crisp’s data ingestion team, Eric worked on helping customer data flow into Crisp from different retail portals.

One thing that customers appreciate about Crisp is its reliability, ensuring they receive clean, usable data even when retailers update their portals. We can thank Eric for this, as his team helped create the infrastructure that supports this timely and accurate flow of data. Ensuring this reliability was no easy feat, as during his time on the Fetch & Forge team, he would regularly address bugs for over 20 of these connectors. 

Another big accomplishment, Eric also helped design a solution to make Crisp compatible  with retail portals’ 2-factor authentication systems, which can interrupt  automated data flows. A simple solution for this did not previously exist, so it took some time to figure out how to manage thousands of asynchronous text authentications – but the team pulled it off. 

Since joining Crisp and working through these unique challenges, Eric has quickly expanded his technological skill set.

“I’ve learned infrastructure and deployment, and so many new programming languages very quickly, which is great,” he remarks, “I enjoy it.”

“Everyone is really proud to be here. They’re knowledgeable, easy to work with, and willing to help at any time.” 

Eric Takemoto

Building UNFI Insights

Whereas on Fetch & Forge, Eric was maneuvering between a variety of data ingestion points, his most recent work has been focused on only one. 

Eric Takemoto is now part of Crisp’s Luminist team, working to build a new, state-of-the-art reporting product for UNFI suppliers called UNFI Insights. The platform is currently in beta mode, and CPGs of all sizes – including top household brand names – are eager to adopt it to track their distribution and sales with UNFI. 

UNFI Insights also features dashboards and advanced analytics to help suppliers manage deductions, identify new sales opportunities, and better manage inventory to reduce food waste. 

These dashboards are organized, easy to use, and reflect accurate, daily data that surfaces valuable, actionable insights for UNFI suppliers – thanks to the systems that Eric and his team have engineered for this industry game-changing partnership.

A job well done

When Eric joined Crisp two years ago, the team was smaller and the company was younger, working to innovate and fine-tune the functions of the flagship data platform.

Today, hundreds of CPG companies are using Crisp, with more joining and integrating the platform as an integral part of their data processes every week. We continue to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback about the quality and purposefulness of the product. 

While every member on our team contributes to the quality product we have today, we would like to take this opportunity to recognize Eric Takemoto for his contributions as Software Engineer these past two years. Thank you Eric –  and congratulations on a successful launch of UNFI Insights!

If you would like to join Eric, and the rest of the engineering team at Crisp, click here to view our open positions and apply!