Washington State native Lee Harrold’s ability to recognize a fantastic opportunity in the tech world with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and resolve to find a company whose values align with his led him to Indiana and a career at Westfield, Ind.-based SEP.
Harrold, who graduated in 2018 from Santa Clara University in California, found a systems engineering job in Wisconsin, returned home to Washington for an internship, and then landed with SEP, a general software consultancy that works with clients across a wide variety of industries, including life sciences, financial technology, aerospace, pharma, agriculture, and more.
“We like to say that the kind of work we do is like all around you and ubiquitous,” says Lee of SEP. “The food you eat was likely harvested by a thing running software we wrote or the medical devices you use run on software that we probably had a hand in.”
While Lee studied theater arts in the Bay Area, he was exposed to the ever-changing technological advances made in the region, including AI. Lee met people in the industry and recognized that this could be something he could get into. “This is a marketable skill, and I saw that as an opportunity and I took advantage of it,” says Lee.
Following an attempt to form a startup with a professor from college, Lee moved to Wisconsin. “I moved to Wisconsin when it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to get a developer job with the credentials I had and so I needed to get some professional reps in at a large, well-known company doing a tech adjacent job,” Lee says.
Lee’s first introduction to the Midwest was at a software development company in Wisconsin. The company offered a career progression pathway to garner reps, but quickly realizing the company’s mandatory, costly training program wasn’t a good fit, Lee looked for alternative ways to gain experience. He moved back home to Washington, completed an online internship, and prepared for his next career step.
“At that period when I was living with my parents, I just found an internship online and built my resume experience and prepared for interviews and stuff in that period,” hesays. It was then that Lee discovered the Ascend Network.
Lee had remembered that his alma mater used the job board service Handshake and saw Ascend was a registered partner. Lee signed up for the Ascend Network, created a profile, and discovered SEP. After reviewing the company’s description and open roles, Lee was stunned. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, these values align literally verbatim to the ones that I have!’ I had written down the things that I wanted out of a software company and what I wanted my career to be, mentorship aspirations, how I thought time should be spent, and how a software company should perform. It was like these were the same lists. Like this is absurd! How is this possible? I would never have found this company on my own,” he says.
Lee has been with SEP for over three years now and recently joined the company’s AI practice as an AI engineer. He has enjoyed his experience and the creative liberties the company gives him and its employees.
“We have what is called ‘I-time,’ where the company trusts an employee enough to allow them to spend whatever time they have between projects on whatever they find to be valuable. And so, without that trust in place, I don’t think anyone would have let me go off for two months and prototype our internal LLM sandbox so that we could have code assistant platforms that adhere to our company’s strict master services agreement to prevent us from accidentally surfacing our customers’ IP. There are very few companies that give that kind of license to do something like that.”
