Matter Stories: Livia Lay, Software QA Manager

Tell us about yourself. (Where are you located, career journey, what brought you to this industry?)

Hello! I'm Livia Lay, and I'm a curious individual who is discovering how I can merge my interests of leading edge technology, and creating harmony and sustainability in communities and the environment. I live in the Greater Toronto Area in the province of Ontario, Canada. 

I started off my career in 3D models at a lidar manufacturing company, where I had the opportunity to work very closely with raw lidar data to calibrate and characterize airborne lidar systems, and align output lidar data combined with inertial measurement unit and GPS data in post-processing to generate digital elevation and surface models as a Technical Analyst. 10 years later, I worked for a software company as a Senior Geospatial Analyst where I helped to validate object detection algorithms on airborne lidar data that I post-processed that provided insights for community safety. After Matterport acquired the software company, I continue to work with 3D model data providing insights to customers.

What excites you most about your role?

I feel that my role is at the intersection of many of my passions as a QA Manager in the 3D Experiences team, which includes the Matterport App where the digital twins are first captured using leading edge hardware integrated with the app, and also the Showcase and Workshop tools where the final 3D models are visualized and edited with all of the models assets that add so much value to them-- such as tags, Property Intelligence, measurements, and so much more. 

Last but definitely not least, I love the people who I work with. As a people manager, I get to know my employees' career journey and help them grow in any way that I can so that they can reach their goals. 

Tell us about your biggest accomplishment or favorite project at Matterport? What was it, were there any challenges, and how was it successful?

The latest Winter Release included Property Intelligence, which was the longest project that our team has worked on since I joined Matterport. I saw so many previous projects come together to make this large project complete. What was challenging about this project was also what helped make it a success. It required an immense amount of cross-functional collaborative teamwork across almost all of our teams at Matterport, from R&D and beyond. It wouldn't have worked any other way, especially as a member of the Quality Assurance team where there was a need to ensure cross-functional end-to-end workflow testing. 

Are you involved in any programs such as EMERGE, Matterport Cares, ERGs etc., if so why? What’s been a memorable experience?

I was fortunate enough to be nominated and given the opportunity to be a part of Matterport's 2023 EMERGE program, which stands for Elevating Matterpeep's Empowerment, Retention, Growth, and Excellence. It provided me with closer proximity to leadership at Matterport for mentorship, and we worked in teams to solve real business problems that we needed to present to leadership at the end of the program. It was amazing to learn how to present to executives, and actually get an immediate "Yes" from the CEO to implement a solution that my team proposed. 

I attended a Matterport conference in September 2023 where we built bicycles for local high school students for a Matterport Cares event, which was such a neat experience! Most recently, I participated in Matterport's February 2024 Lunar New Year presentation before the Dragon Dancers arrived!