Where Engineering Meets Advocacy: Taylor Parker at Atticus

Taylor Parker, a technical lead on the Growth Engineering team at Atticus, started down a path familiar to many engineers: building websites as a (self-proclaimed) nerdy 12-year-old. He learned the basics in after-school coding workshops, tinkering in Notepad, and even landing an internship at Boeing at just 16. From the outside, it might have looked like his future in computer engineering was already set. But Parker’s path was anything but straightforward.

Over the years, he explored becoming a mechanical engineer, then an aerospace engineer. Later, as a neuroscience major, he set his sights on psychiatry—studying for the MCAT and even interviewing at medical schools. Yet none of those paths quite felt right. Parker wanted to make a meaningful impact—and to do it quickly—something the long road of medical training couldn’t offer.

During his undergraduate years at the University of California, Los Angeles, Parker discovered a growing passion for advocacy. As a webmaster for the UCLA Volunteer Center, he helped support outreach efforts, including working the UCLA booth at Special Olympics Southern California events. Also on campus, Parker was involved with the Bruin Guardian Scholars, a program offering services to current and former foster youth.

The work was deeply personal: Parker was raised by his grandmother and emancipated at 18—an experience that shaped his perspective and deepened his commitment to helping others. “I care a lot about helping people, especially people who are very disadvantaged by a system,” says Parker. 

So how does that journey connect to his work at Atticus? Today, Parker leads a group of engineers focused on building and iterating products to help more people access disability benefits. A major focus of his team’s work is automated communications: tools that make it easier to take the first step toward getting help.

The challenge is about lowering barriers. “How do we break down that activation energy to be smaller for them?” explains Parker. “How do we make it easier for them to engage with us when it works for them—when they feel comfortable and when they’re ready—and also help encourage them to realize: you are ready. You can talk to us. It’s going to be okay.”

Parker points to a recent project as an example: Call Me Now, a tool designed to streamline the first point of contact between potential clients and Atticus. The feature starts with an automated SMS conversation and quickly connects the person to an Atticus client advocate, who can walk them through their disability benefit options and introduce them to legal support if needed.

“For the Call Me Now SMS workflow, we use Twilio, CustomerIO, and our internal call creation and prioritization system, which ensures that the Call Me Now ticket is considered a high-priority task for our customer service team,” says Parker.

One of the biggest challenges of the workflow is ensuring the client responds affirmatively and that outbound calls are triggered for an available client. “Something we needed to iterate on was handling Spanish (sí versus yes) and making sure users were specifically responding to a Call Me Now message, rather than responding to any other message we could have sent them. The coordination of these steps is complex, and the tools we use to handle SMS are not very smart, which is why engineers have to fill those gaps.” 

The project has seen huge success—Call Me Now is the foundation for future features, such as Call Scheduling. The workflow gave the engineering team an architectural pattern for using SMS to trigger other core business features, such as SMS Surveys and Interactive Retainer Comms.

“Our system uses an Event-Driven Architecture, enabling us to scale very effectively to meet incoming request demand,” says Parker, noting the team has yet to discover the limit of the system. Call Me Now is the kind of high-impact work Parker was hoping to do, connecting thousands of clients to support for disability benefits.

“We impact 100,000 people in a year. That is magnitudes more than what I could have done as a medical professional,” says Parker. “That is so important to me, and it’s why I love being on the Growth team.”

For Parker, the opportunity to do this high-impact work is made even more meaningful by the people he works with every day. “Everyone here is incredibly smart, thoughtful, and a little weird in a good way,” he says with a laugh. “I work with my favorite engineers and the best product people I've ever worked with.”

“At Atticus, you are encouraged to grow—a growth mindset is a core aspect of being successful here,” says Parker. There are other markers of success for an Atticus employee. “You have to have high ownership, really care about taking stuff through the finish line, and you have to be able to bring other people with you.” Ultimately, Parker sums up who thrives at Atticus simply: “People who want to get shit done.”

At Atticus, engineers have the flexibility to work across a range of responsibilities—from coding to EM work to management. Since joining the company in 2024, Parker has been stepping beyond his comfort zone and growing into a managerial role. “If you want to grow, you want to own something, or you want space to do something, you can get it here,” says Parker. This flexibility extends to the day-to-day workflow, where engineers have the resources to explore new tools. “We're able to make the best decisions for us to move faster. It's cool to be an empowered engineer, picking the tools you need to do the job best, and for the company to throw its support behind us. It's really nice."

It’s the kind of environment Parker once hoped to find as an engineer: a place where curiosity is encouraged, growth is possible, and the work directly impacts thousands of people.