Welcome to Prodigy: Leo Scur

Our Welcome to Prodigy series spotlights some of the top talent to recently join our mission to help every student in the world love learning! Want to be part of our team? Check out our open positions here!

Meet Leo Scur - Software Developer III, Math Game! Leo joined Prodigy in January 2024, is a Software Developer III on our Math Game team, and is also Prodigy’s first-ever hire from Brazil!

Hey Leo—welcome to Prodigy! What is your role here?

I teach the computer how to play the game! That’s probably a very weird way of saying it—but I’m a developer, working with the ‘ROX’ squad as part of our Math Game team, where we work on new features for our students.

What is your career background?

Since I was a kid I knew that I wanted to make games. I started off working in web development, pretty standard eCommerce and B2B stuff. This was really just a foot in the door for software development, as games were my objective and focus of study. Eventually, I moved to a Brazilian educational software company, which had a small gamedev division, where I worked on corporate training games and simulators. Then I moved to a company that makes a very popular kids’ social mobile game. But the one thing I didn’t like about mobile games was the business model—always interrupting gameplay with ads, and very aggressive monetization. So that burned me out for a while, and the main reason I was interested in Prodigy was their focus on using games to help kids learn.

You are our first hire from Brazil. What's it like working remotely from another country?

I was already used to remote working since the pandemic. We have fewer meetings at Prodigy, which is a blessing, but it can also be a challenge, as it may take a little longer to get used to the team you’re working with. But the team has been very welcoming and supportive. It’s also the first company I’ve worked at which has an updated Confluence page—I can do a search there or on Slack—and can find the information I need almost immediately, before asking someone. That helps me to be more confident in what I’m doing.

What attracted you to Prodigy?

As I said, I was looking to move away from mobile games. Prodigy then reached out to me. Being based in Brazil, I hadn’t actually heard about them before. So I tried out the game and loved it. I was immediately sold on how the game achieves its educational goals while still being a compelling experience.The funny thing was, when I joined the company I was told I should play the game and get to around level 20—but by that time I was already at level 35! I played a lot of DragonFable when I was younger and Prodigy Math reminded me of that. It’s the same idea of screen-based levels with turn-based battles.

What have you enjoyed most during your first few weeks?

Because I knew nothing about Prodigy beforehand, I really didn’t know what to expect during the recruitment process. I learned so many cool things about it. Just to see the different approaches to games and software development compared with my other roles was great. In Brazil, there’s so much emphasis on doing things fast rather than doing the right things—sometimes we’d ship things that some wouldn’t even call a minimum viable product! The mindset here is different. It’s much more about ensuring what we make provides value to our users. We talk about being User Obsessed a lot, and that’s really what we do here. We care about the effectiveness of what we make.

What excites you about the future at Prodigy?

There is so much opportunity for our games. We’re already doing new and exciting things with our Math Game. There are a lot of interesting challenges and puzzles to make the user experience even better. I want to make the products I work on cool, and there’s lots of opportunity and freedom here to do that.

What advice would you give to someone who was considering joining Prodigy?

I would say yes—come and join! My reasons come from my background, and wanting to work for a mission-driven company among great people. If you are in a similar situation and want a breath of fresh air, it’s a great opportunity to do something not only important, but also fun and interesting!

Interested in joining Leo at Prodigy? Check out our open positions!