Cocoon is an employee leave platform designed to address every type of employee leave and empower companies to better support their team members through life’s most pivotal moments. Whether that’s having a baby, dealing with a personal medical issue, or caring for a sick family member, we ensure leave is taken care of (from compliance to payroll to claims).
Job Openings at Cocoon
Top Engineering Values
Each team is asked to select, explain, and rank their top 8 values in order of importance.When our co-founders first started learning about different types of leave and what a huge problem it was, they were baffled – how could something that seems so incredibly common be so painful? After hearing countless stories, however, such as one friend being wheeled into a C-section while simultaneously trying to fill out disability paperwork on her laptop, they knew something had to be done. Whether it’s taking parental leave, caring for a sick family member, or dealing with a personal medical issue, Cocoon was founded to make what has traditionally been a cumbersome, bureaucratic process easy and stress-free for both employers and employees.
We’re not building software for software’s sake. Rather, we’re leveraging technology to have a direct, positive impact on people’s lives. The empathy we share for our users, and our passion for what we’re building, inherently puts the product at the center of everything we do. We believe in getting in the arena versus watching from the sidelines. Engineers play a large role in defining our product roadmap and obsess over the details – whether that’s writing code, supporting marketing of new features, or working with customer support to better understand users’ pain points. It’s safe to say we’re a team of doers who are excited to roll up our sleeves, dive into the nuts-and-bolts of how things work, and thrive on having a high level of craftsmanship. We show up for our users, our customers, and each other – which means both celebrating wins together and supporting one another when it’s hard. Our mission is ambitious, but so are we!
We identify key areas of the product that we’d like to invest in and then empower engineers to own projects all the way from ideation to shipping, monitoring, and extending a feature. While we look for people who are proactive, resourceful, and love taking initiative, it’s equally important that folks we hire aren’t afraid to ask for help when needed. As a team, we value being meticulous and sweating the details across the entire process of scoping, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and partnering with cross-functional teammates as needed – not just writing excellent code.
A great example of an engineering-driven project is the Cocoon Insights feature, which provides curated data to employers on their leave policy coverage, utilization, and benefit recovery. Our engineers worked directly with the customer success team to figure out what data points would be pertinent for our employer partners and collaborated with product and design to create a beautiful representation of those data. In addition to shipping the feature itself, our engineers collaborated with marketing and sales on the messaging around the launch, resulting in a blog post sharing real stories from employers who use Cocoon’s insights to make strategic policy decisions.
Our goal is to make it easier for everyone on the team to do their job, which is why we always put the team first. If we see something that needs to be addressed, we jump on it regardless of who touched it last– we share ownership over our codebase, tooling, and processes. If something doesn’t go as planned, we never place the blame on a teammate. During retros, mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities, and we always focus on how we can improve our systems and processes.
Engineering is broken into two teams – the Core Leave and Pay Team is focused on the end to end leave experience for employees, while the Enablement Platform Team owns the employer journey and lifetime at Cocoon. Each team works closely with product and design to help create focus and increase efficiency.
All code is reviewed by at least one peer and we regularly seek input from each other whether it’s to brainstorm or share specific domain knowledge. We pride ourselves on open Slack channels, frequent pairing, to pairing or hopping on huddles to chat through a problem.
As a company, one of our core values is ‘row together.’ Given the nature of our work and how complex the user experience is, having as much context as possible is paramount. We strongly believe that our product improves with more perspectives, which is why everything from scoping a project to pairing on execution requires a high degree of collaboration. As Alicia, one of our engineering managers puts it, “I’ve found at other companies that it can be easy to be siloed or only rely on a PM to think through customer user problems. At Cocoon, it’s the opposite. We’re encouraged to get many different perspectives, whether that’s working closely with customer success, support, operations, legal, and even marketing.”
As a new engineer who joins the team, you could find yourself hopping on user testing calls, collaborating with an internal team to understand and help improve their bottlenecks, or digging into specific state leave policies with the help of our legal team (we often joke that we know the California EDD website better than most people who work there). An advantage of being a small but mighty team is that you’ll have a great amount of exposure to all parts of the business. Want to shadow a sales call? Go for it! The opportunities for learning and tackling interesting, thorny problems with real-world impact are endless.
Having a strong documentation culture is key to our success. It forces rigorous thinking, reflection, and enables better context and knowledge sharing. This helps us be radically transparent: we have open email lists and documentation, and share strategic context like board meeting notes and fundraising plans internally so everyone is empowered with the same information.
Without a shared writing culture, information becomes siloed (even with the best of intentions!), goals become unclear or misaligned, and it’s hard to execute efficiently. Many companies default to adding more and more review or “sign-off” processes in order to make sure the right decisions get made, which is the opposite of the autonomous culture we want to build. Our HQ office is in San Francisco, but we’re remote-friendly, and writing things down is important to keep everyone in the loop. To make sure we’re remote-inclusive, we also have certain virtual norms, such as having your individual camera on during Zoom meetings, even during company-wide all-hands.
On the engineering team, we have several Slack channels for folks to ask questions about different projects and share information. Outside of our weekly engineering all-hands, meeting cadence varies depending on the team, but we try to be as intentional as possible about synchronous time. Whether you like to pair program or prefer to work more independently, we have team members who enjoy different working styles. In fact, one of the first things new hires do is write a “Working With Me” doc describing their working style and preferences. We then share these during team meetings so we can get to know each other a little better, and if you’re curious about how someone on a different team prefers to work, you can always access those docs, too!
We debate (and reflect) without ego. It’s important to us that the people we work with are kind, open-minded, and generous, but also aren’t afraid to raise a concern or passionately debate an issue they believe in. We care deeply about what we're working on, and have high trust and mutual respect for one another. While we may disagree and debate, we do it to push each other, our product, and company to the limits we know we’re capable of.
Everyone on the team is “an excellent communicator, able to unblock themselves quickly, and takes ownership without waiting to be told what to do,” says James, one of our founding engineers. We’re fortunate to have senior engineers who bring a wealth of experience, knowledge, and mentorship to the team. To list two examples, Jarrod brings a wealth of startup experience, most recently helping scale the engineering team at Brex from a single small engineering team to hundreds of engineers across dozens of teams, and Jesse has worked at other HR Tech companies like Gusto, and enjoys simplifying complex project requirements and figuring out better ways for the engineering team to work together.
Last but not least, there’s a healthy degree of mentorship internally. We have very thoughtful leaders, both technically and on the interpersonal side who set great examples. A lot of engineers help mentor and push each other, so we can improve what we do on a continuous basis. Similarly, our cross-functional partners – like Michelle and Frank on the legal team – are also experts at what they do. We strongly encourage you to get to know your fellow team members and have a variety of in-person and virtual team events to build a cohesive team!
When it comes to making employee leave an easier, more transparent process, we practice what we preach. Leading by example, we’ve introduced compassionate leave – a comprehensive paid leave policy that accounts for less typical reasons employees may need time off beyond those covered by existing laws and policies. Regardless of tenure, all part- and full-time team members are given the flexibility and trust to take the time they need without disclosing the reason to HR (something that often prevents people from taking leave in sensitive situations like pregnancy loss or mental health). Since we believe millions of workers should have access to compassionate paid leave, we also open-sourced our policy language (vetted by our compliance lawyers) so that other companies can adopt similar policies.
Everyone is a creator and embraces challenges with a “how might we” mindset to leave things better than we found them. We’ll never be satisfied with the status quo and are constantly innovating to improve the employee leave experience. For instance, pay is often a huge stressor for people taking leave since it’s common to see income from several different sources (e.g. employer, disability insurance, and a state program) on an irregular schedule. To solve for this, we created a pay tracker dashboard, so folks can easily see how much they’re getting paid, when, and from which sources.
Our annual hack week only underscored this passion to push boundaries and truly transform employee leave. Whether it was something small like turning a plain-text email into a beautifully-designed template (which is now live in production) or bigger, like thinking about how companies can preview policies before even signing up for Cocoon, we came up with countless creative ways to improve the product. Since good ideas can come from anywhere, we also have a “What if?” Slack channel where anyone in the company can share an idea – and sometimes engineers can even ship it that same day!
Employee leave is a highly regulated space that’s constantly evolving. In addition to a growing push for federal paid family leave, several states (e.g. Massachusetts and Colorado) have released their own paid leave programs, while others have constructed mandates around specific leave types (e.g. organ donation in California). What’s more, with COVID-19 creating a more distributed workforce, companies are increasingly dealing with the complexities of managing employee leave in accordance with multiple state and local laws. We aren’t afraid to change strategies quickly as needed to keep up with market shifts and provide the best user experience. For instance, while we discussed expanding to cover international leaves, we realized that launching caregiver leave should take priority in order to better serve our existing users in their times of need.
As a fast-moving startup in this space, we place a strong emphasis on correctness, since the code we ship immediately impacts users’ daily lives. In just one year, we’ve gone from deploying 3-5 times a week to 40-50 by automating our deploy pipeline. We’ll cut scope and iterate as needed to get features to customers quickly without sacrificing quality. We believe it is better to make a decision with conviction and learn from the outcomes than to make no decision at all. Welcoming new information allows us to iterate quickly and continually evolve.
If joining a rapidly growing, mission-driven startup resonates with you, we’re hiring!
Unlimited vacation and sick time with a suggested 3-week minimum. 4 weeks compassionate leave, 14 weeks paid parental leave, and 4 weeks each for paid medical and caregiver leave.
Typescript, React and Next.js on the client, GraphQL API, Node.js + Express on the server, Postgres, AWS
We start with an initial chat with a recruiter, followed by a collaborative coding screen with an engineer and a call with the hiring manager. The coding screen problem is a practical programming exercise and can be completed in your language of choice. After that, we have a virtual onsite and if it’s a good fit, we’ll make an offer!