My First Week at SageOx
Graduating from the University of Washington, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do next. Having worked as an engineer in both startup and corporate environments, I was looking for a team that would genuinely challenge and push me out of my comfort zone. I found that at SageOx.
I was sold on their mission immediately. Both individuals and teams working with AI agents constantly struggle with context living in different spaces; meeting notes, personal documents, and past coding sessions. Today, development typically requires starting a fresh session and manually explaining what you're working on, relying entirely on the human to feed the agent the proper context.
SageOx stores and efficiently distributes context, fixing this exact bottleneck. A simple idea with huge engineering problems behind it.
Through Foundations, a community of builders in Seattle that both Milkana and I are a part of, I reached out directly to her to learn more about SageOx and highlight what I was building. After some back and forth, Milkana saw in me someone who is a quick learner, knows how to operate at startup speed, and willing to do what it takes to move the company forward.
We agreed with the role and job description being a bit vague until we knew more, so I started as a Chief of Staff of sorts.
Coming in hot
I was brought in to support Milkana and the growth team. Between the inbound interest in the company and the product, and the planned marketing activities, the team needed help. On day 1, I jumped right in. I was introduced to the Merge Wall, a daily ritual taking less than 20 minutes where everyone on the team casually and quickly explains what they are working on, where they need to be unblocked, new findings worth sharing, and celebrating wins. (And yes, SageOx was listening, so our agents also knew what we were up to!)
For lunch, I sat down with Emory, Tobias, and Alex, learning about their backgrounds and what brought each of them to SageOx. Sitting nearby Faridun and Lau made a huge difference in my first week. I got advice and guidance from them as they were fresh off their work trials.
What I built
Day two rolled around, and I was already diving into code, starting to build out my core project before lunch. No matter your job title at SageOx, everyone is building, and fast. That speed was entirely new to me; I hadn’t heard of any company enabling a new hire to ship code quite that fast.
Later that day, the whole team went out to lunch together. Galex shared his background working with databases and explained how his time at Microsoft eventually led him to SageOx. He also recommended the classic movie WarGames, which instantly went on my watch list.
Throughout the week, Madhur and the rest of the engineering team acted as incredible mentors. They struck the perfect balance, giving me the freedom to figure things out on my own while staying completely open whenever I needed guidance.
Even with her incredibly busy schedule, Milkana made time to check in on me. She showed me what I was doing right and, more importantly, what I was missing.
Being able to check SageOx for existing context allowed me to move autonomously and much faster. Checking the system for architectural patterns, past decisions, and how to do things saved time, tokens, and potential headaches. SageOx also helped me set up my agents faster and allowed them to understand the codebase with no input from me, so I could start my project instead.
By the end of the week, using the SageOx agent toolkit, I had built an agent that did the work I was initially assigned to do manually. Before I knew it I was already on to the next project.
