AJ Hallac is a Founding Engineer at Maybern, where he leads critical initiatives on our Core Team.

Before joining Maybern, AJ spent 3 years at Cadre, where he built out accounting tools which helped to significantly cut fund admin costs. Outside of work, AJ enjoys playing soccer and travelling. He’s been to all 7 continents, and yes that includes Antarctica!

What brought you to Maybern?

AJ: I knew I wanted to work at another startup and evaluated my options on three key metrics:

1. Trust in Leadership
2. Belief in Product-Market Fit
3. Ability to Execute

Maybern excels in all three. Having worked with Ross and Ashwin directly at Cadre, I had complete confidence in this leadership team's vision and capabilities. Secondly, whenever I spoke with professionals working in the private markets space, their eyes would light up at the concept behind Maybern; I immediately recognized there was a genuine market need for what Ross and Ashwin were building. And finally, I see the Engineering team as responsible for execution, which is where I knew I could make a meaningful contribution—and that's the fun part!

What technical challenges at Maybern are you most excited to be solving?

AJ: At Maybern, we pursue the simplest possible solution. Just because we're tackling complex financial scenarios doesn't mean our solution needs to be complicated! We're not building a consulting or custom-code shop; rather, we're creating highly opinionated, yet highly configurable workflows with the goal of redefining what a modern back office looks like.

From a technical perspective, our product architecture is uniquely forward-thinking. We've built an extremely wide foundation first, preparing for the inevitable intersection of our key product pillars. For example, our data model accommodates everything from complex waterfall calculations to investor reporting within a unified system, rather than creating separate siloed applications. This ensures we're not building in isolation and enables fundamental flexibility in our approach. While at other companies this might have been five unique but independent product lines, we’ve built it together from the start.

How does your team approach building software that handles such complex financial scenarios?

AJ: To achieve both simplicity and comprehensiveness while navigating the complex private markets landscape, we continuously engage with internal and external stakeholders to understand potential edge cases. We then design solutions that address these complexities without sacrificing usability. This often means asking fund managers about scenarios they haven't even considered!

For instance, when building out our capital call engine, we did extensive research, collaborating with our various design partners. Now, users can define any metric for how to allocate capital calls to investors, users can define when to use which metric for allocating, and select across a wide range of rounding strategies. All of this in a simple UI without requiring custom code for implementing new customers.

What makes the engineering culture at Maybern unique?

AJ: It sounds cliche, but we have an incredibly dynamic, fast-paced, and collaborative working environment. To ensure close partnership on a daily basis, in our office, our engineering team’s desks are situated between our Product Managers and our subject matter experts’ desks. We want our engineers to think like accountants and end-users because we believe it will result in a better product. If you don't understand what you're building, you won't build the right product. When planning out projects, engineers at Maybern frequently grab internal stakeholders for whiteboarding sessions to work through the problem at hand and align on a solution. 

This proximity has shaped our hiring philosophy – we look for exceptional engineers who are genuinely good people and who want to partner with both internal and external stakeholders. Maybern's engineering culture is built on a high level of trust and the expectation that our engineers will work together to understand the root of any problem. It's been rewarding to see this collaborative and supportive learning environment scale over the last three years.

Finally, what makes you the most proud about your time at Maybern so far? 

AJ: Looking back on my time at Maybern to date, I'm really proud that we got so much of the original, core architecture right. For example, the code for Allocations and how we model a fund's structure and its entities is largely unchanged from what we first developed three years ago. This validates our "wide foundation" approach and demonstrates that our flexible yet simple architecture enables us to scale and iterate as we continue to expand. What's particularly satisfying is seeing how this technical foundation directly translates to client success. When a CFO tells us they've reduced their calculation time by 75% or can now run complex scenarios in minutes instead of days, I know our engineering decisions are making a real difference. As we continue to grow, I'm excited to see how we can further transform fund operations by maintaining our commitment to elegant solutions for complex problems.

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Interested in joining a team solving fascinating technical challenges and building industry-defining product? Explore our open engineering roles here.