Our vision is to build a fairer future by providing a better understanding of the past.

We believe that past mistakes shouldn’t determine future job prospects. Our team works with several organizations focused on re-entry and education programs operating inside prisons. We have an internal committee, Bounce Back To Work, that meets weekly to focus on outreach and collaboration with different organizations across the country, helping get people with criminal records back into the job market. Every quarter, a few engineers volunteer to help teach valuable software and coding skills to inmates at San Quentin, helping them earn 30x more money than with the typical manufacturing jobs available while incarcerated.

We value cross-functional teams that bring together key stakeholders from across the company to accomplish a shared goal.

Not only does working collaboratively allow us to build connections, but it also strengthens our understanding of our users. Product Managers and Engineers get to work with stakeholders in legal, operations, finance, sales, etc., to help design and build systems serving their individual needs. Whether this is building better compliance and auditing tools for legal, better sales forecasting frameworks for the sales team, or more efficient processes for our operation teams, everyone benefits. The amount of collaboration depends on the team. You don’t have to work directly with stakeholders all the time, but it is a big part of our culture!

We like to move fast and innovate.

We have lots of different microservices and applications, and we’re constantly shipping new features. As soon as a PR is merged, tests are run and things are auto deployed to our infrastructure. Our DevOps team has built a great (and open source) layer on top of kubernetes that allows engineers to ship new services quickly and reliably with out-of-the-box logging, metrics, scaling, or load balancing. We like to work with our hands untied so we can make real impact, every day.

We are constantly innovating for our customers.

We try to push the boundaries of what customers expect a background check to be while remaining compliant and accurate. For example, we offer a white label applicant portal, allow other products to use our API via OAuth, and are using machine learning to predict how long a background check will take. We work closely with customers and applicants to identify real problems they face in their workflows, opportunities to increase their data quality, and ways to help them stay compliant. By taking smart risks, we are leveraging technology in ways that the industry has never seen before.

We strive to push ourselves to try new things and build a culture of learning from failures instead of assigning blame.

Things are going to go wrong or not work –– it is how we react to them that define how we move forward. We’ve built several services and products that worked for a while but needed to be torn down and rebuilt later. Our needs change, the industry changes, and over time, our customers expect more, too. As a result, we need to be able to adapt and respond quickly. Our data is used to power the growing on-demand economy, and beyond, and we need to be able to deliver what our customers need.

We have a strong practice of internal and external post-mortems when an issue occurs and take ownership when things go wrong. For example, when switching to new infrastructure, a command was accidentally run in production that was designed for development… this resulted in a database being dropped! 😱 Our whole team rallied and we had it restored within minutes along with pull requests out to prevent it from happening again. All the while, we experienced zero downtime! 😎

We are growing like crazy!

In the past year we have doubled the size of our team, and we plan to double again this year. We want to be at 80+ in product and engineering by the end of 2018. This includes engineers, product managers, designers, and engineering managers. We have just begun to revolutionize our industry and need many more people to help execute on that vision. We want to grow beyond being a stage in the hiring funnel and start driving the hiring funnel. There is still a lot of work to do and we need great people to reach our ambitious goals. If you’re interested, learn more about our interview process and reach out if you’d like to apply!

We have lunch together.

Our cross-team and cross-functional collaboration happen naturally as we all like to have lunch together every day. Our free, catered-in lunch is just an added perk of sitting down with a colleague and enjoying a meal together. Don't you end up eating with the same people who you normally hang out with anyways, you might ask? Not at Checkr! We have a built-in opportunity to join an optional group lunch every Friday with randomly selected people throughout the company, so you get to know and stay connected with each other better.

Creating fair career opportunities is very important to us; after all, we are driven by our mission to create a fairer future by improving understanding of the past.

We walk the talk when it comes to all people practices, starting from continuously improving our interview processes to promoting equal career growth opportunities within engineering to ensuring a culture where everybody can truly be themselves at work. We do this by raising the bar, and we aspire to be a leader in creating a fair and safe environment for everyone to grow with our team.