Meet our newest team members

Written by Taran Enger-Mår

Spring has sprung and we've been busy at Sanity with the launch of our Content Lake, as well as adding six new incredible team members! With each new addition to our company, our team strengthens and diversifies in talents, background, and knowledge. We have the privilege to bring this expertise to task in our mission to redefine how companies think about their content.

• We value our community dearly, what it means for our product and the resource it has become for people building with Sanity. We know that to build a great product, diversity is a key success factor. We want to build a product that empowers and is being used everyone, and our community is a big part of that. We are therefore thrilled to finally have filled the role that will work on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in our community. Please welcome Lauren!
• Our Design and Engineering team is growing, and we are strengthening it further with two new full stack developers. We are gearing up to make Sanity even stronger and better. Please welcome Rico and Sindre!
• Telling Sanity's story and what the product is all about is one of the most important tasks we have ahead of us. Content is data is just the beginning, there is a lot to come. Please welcome Marcus!
• We’re growing the team that interacts with our customers, ensuring they find success with structured content on Sanity! Welcome, Simeon!
• How we interact with our future customers is important to us, we want them to experience our culture and values from the start. Welcome Kevan!
  

Learn more about our newest colleagues below and meet them in our Community Slack!

We are still hiring, so be sure to check out our careers page to see what positions we have open.

Meet our new team members

Lauren Etheridge is our new Developer Relations Specialist! She will focus on strategic diversity, inclusion, and equality (DEI) efforts within our Sanity community. Previously, she was a lead web developer/programmer analyst at North Carolina State University. Before transitioning into web development and digital communications in academia, Lauren was a social worker and community educator in the field of harm reduction. Her passion lies in digital ethics, transformative justice, community & collaborative style learning, building things with the Raspberry Pi motherboard and making experimental music.

When asked why she decided to join Sanity, Lauren shared: “I decided to join because Sanity’s values resonated with me, especially the belief that empathy and trust bring out the best version of ourselves. This is not a common sentiment expressed in the private sector. So, I knew immediately that Sanity offered a culture I wanted to be a part of and help to shape. Not to mention, the DevRel, DEI Efforts position is my dream job! For a long time, I imagined having a role that was like a digital social worker in which I helped to make the digital common space accessible and welcoming for everyone. Well, I don’t have to imagine it anymore because Sanity created it! I am excited to be here and looking forward to all the things we will accomplish together.” Lauren joined us March 3rd and will be working remotely from North Carolina.

Rico Kahler is our new Front End Developer! Before this role, he worked at Bloomscape leading the effort to take their storefront headless, creating one of the most impressive Sanity deployments we’ve seen! In that role Rico learned a lot about the challenges of orchestrating content. Sanity quickly became their next generation content hub, doing multiple jobs, and replacing multiple tools. For the past year, he’s spent a lot of his time working on his own open source projects, (including a few Sanity plugins!), but Rico is also looking forward to things opening back up. In the meantime Rico’s got his open source and his cats.

When asked why he moved on to Sanity, Rico said, “I decided to join Sanity because I get it — content is data and structured data is power to us devs. I believe in the vision and I’ve seen it work first hand. I’m truly honored to join and excited to contribute back to a product I love.” Rico joins us May 24th, and will be remotely based in Michigan!

Sindre Gulseth joined our team as a Full-Stack Developer! Software engineer turned Ops turned Software Engineer, Sindre started as a web developer over eight years ago, and has since then worked his way “down the stack” from operations with VG.no (the largest news site in Norway), back up to developing with Arundo Analytics and co-founding a travel tech startup! With a special affinity to the backend side of things, a propensity for Go and a love for SRE-related challenges, Sindre is adding well practiced insight of development to our team.

When asked why he was excited to join Sanity, Sindre said: “There is a lot of good talent and people here at Sanity, and I like the challenge of working on a global product that spans borders (not that many companies that do that). I really like Sanity’s goals and vision to enable people and companies all over the world to do what they’re good at - produce the content and show it off how it fits them.” Sindre also joined us on March 3rd and will be based out of our Oslo, Norway office!

Marcus Sarmento is our new head of Product Marketing! He has over 13 years of B2B marketing experience and is passionate about helping build and scale startups. Before joining Sanity, Marcus held various marketing leadership roles at companies such as Fastly and AppDynamics. When he’s not working on messaging or product launches, Marcus enjoys traveling around the world and trying new cuisines.

When asked why he made the leap to Sanity, Marcus says: “I decided to join Sanity because of the people, the technology, and the market opportunity. The people are hard at work building an amazing culture. The technology is unique and differentiated. And the market opportunity in front of Sanity is huge and only getting bigger by the day!” Marcus, who joined March 15th, will be based out of our San Francisco office, but is looking forward to visiting Norway and the Oslo office soon!

Simeon Griggs is joining our Solutions Engineering team! Simeon was very active in our developer community as a member and contributor, and brings experience with Sanity’s tools across multiple levels. He has been developing websites for small businesses to enterprise clients for over 12 years. Over that time, he’s been self-taught, self-employed, and coded a bit of everything! When not working on awesome coding projects, Simeon is out cycling or inside cooking.

When asked why he chose Sanity, Simeon says, “I describe Sanity as the "CMS I had always dreamed of", so working for Sanity is a dream come true! Going from super-fan and community member to team member is exciting. I'm really looking forward to being on the other side and helping everyone get the very best out of the platform.” Simeon will be based out of the UK and joined our team May 13th!

Kevan Smith is joining our Sales team as our newest Account Executive! In his previous role Kevan had been the lead sales rep at WP Engine, which is a Digital Experience Provider for WordPress. Prior to that he owned and ran a company in which they built out an iOS fitness application where they could track and push workouts to clients globally. This was a business that piggybacked off his time in the military (Marines). As for hobbies, when not at work he is hyper competitive and thus typically spends his time watching sports or going out to Vegas!

When asked what made him choose Sanity, Kevan said, “It was a no brainer. Every time I've spoken to someone with or around Sanity the energy was palpable. Given I already work in the space, I firmly believe in headless being the future of digital experience solutions. Thus, knowing the product was there and the culture was infectious, I couldn't sign on any faster.” Kevan joins us May 17th, and will be based out of Texas!