Our Team
Helping people make better decisions about careers and education wouldn't be possible without our great team at Optimal. We're a bunch of self-described nerds, overachievers, and board game enthusiasts who get excited about solving hard problems and making sure our products live up to our promises.
CEO
Understanding the difficulties of obtaining a quality, affordable education is what inspired founder and CEO Sung Rhee to found Optimal in 2004. He saw a need to create sites dedicated to providing transparent, data-driven information to empower people to make better decisions for their education and careers. He knows prestige doesn't always translate to quality, and Sung doesn't want to see students get a raw deal.
Outside of work, Sung enjoys playing basketball and adding to his collection of Gundam figurines. A fun fact about Sung is that he was a cartoonist for The Harvard Crimson during his college years.
Sung has been featured in several publications, including GeekWire and 425 Business Magazine. Additionally, the CEO Perspective he authored provides a more in-depth look into his background and how Optimal came to be.
Writing & Editing
Our writing and editing team has over 50 years of combined experience and writes the articles, student guides, and other resources across our websites.
Product
Our product team publishes our college rankings, collects feedback from our users to improve our websites, and creates the features and visual design you see across our websites.
Content and Marketing
Our content and marketing team works with journalists, colleges, and other organizations to share our resources with their audiences. They also figure out what topics we should cover and how to best improve our articles to be more helpful to prospective and current students.
Software Engineering
Our software engineers build our websites and the tools that let the rest of the team focus on helping our users.
Accounts
Our account managers work directly with schools to advertise their programs to students with matching interests.
Data Researchers
We have a team of 60 data researchers that research over 40,000 college degrees each year.
CAREERS
At Optimal, we embrace a culture of growth, experimentation, and creativity. Our small and agile team allows all members to exercise great responsibility and freedom, leading each person to have a measurable impact on our business. We also offer unique benefits like tuition reimbursement and charitable donation matching. We enjoy solving hard problems as much as our wine and cheese parties and snuggling with our troop of quirky office dogs.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Optimal's policy is to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, marital status, citizenship, national origin, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. Optimal prohibits any such discrimination or harassment.