IT’S MY JOB BY JEREMY HENDERSON
EDDIE SEAY ’16 Wireless Software Engineering Senior Software Engineer at Chick-Fil-A
Why Auburn? I had a good friend who I grew up with in Nashville who kind of recruited me to Auburn. I knew that I wanted to go to a large, public university in the South and that Auburn, with a strong football program and top-notch academics, felt like a good fit. I knew it had a great College of Engineering, but when I checked it out on the Cupola tour — there was just something different about Auburn. I was interested in building software and writing code, but what drew me to the wireless program was thinking about what skills could help me stand out in the market after graduation. Word on the street is that we have you to thank for the great Chick-fil-A app? Well, the earliest iterations of the Chick-fil-A app technically started quite a while back – as early as 2013. Around the same time, we had a program that was known as “A-List,” which was a grassroots loyalty program that allowed store operators to recognize and reward their most loyal customers. As the program grew, our leadership wanted to expand its reach to reward all customers – more than we could ever do in the existing format. The result of that expansion is what we now know as the Chick-fil-A One loyalty program. In June 2016, we did a major promotional launch of the new program, and that was a really big deal. The promotion offered new members a free Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich for downloading the app and signing up, and it generated the largest spike in app downloads in the App Store’s history – bigger than any launch done by any of the most popular apps you would have on your phone. That was right around the time when I started; it was pretty amazing. Since then, I have served as the staff engineer on the Chick-fil-A App for iOS.
50
SAMUEL GINN COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
