We have a strong track record of hiring engineers who find growth in their career here.

During our interview process, we do our best to assess where someone's skills currently are, but more importantly, where we think they can go (aka aptitude). By aligning someone’s interests with the needs of the business, our engineers often work on things that are new to them and learn along the way.

We have annual professional development stipends, which folks can use to attend conferences or pursue further education in any topic of interest. We also have both organic mentorship and a formalized interdepartmental mentorship program that we started at the end of 2019. Research informs us that organic mentorships are for “people who remind me of myself” and can be inherently exclusive. Furthermore, approaching someone to ask for mentorship can be daunting for someone new in their career, so this program also helps overcome such fears. Our mentorship program is opt-in only and pairs our leaders with mentees to try to align both interests and different business units. We look forward to iterating on our program throughout our initial cohorts.

Finally, our engineers have ample opportunity to teach and learn from one another beyond any mentorship relationship. We have ~35 engineers who are split into smaller product-aligned teams (i.e. mobile, integrations, web app). Each team has a dedicated product manager, works directly with designers, and has high accountability, ownership, and visibility.

Render is a cloud platform built by software developers for software developers.

We’re solving a problem we’re intimately familiar with, giving our product and business a unique edge. Traditionally, when deploying applications in production, developers are forced to pick between two extremes: expensive yet simplistic platforms, or complicated, do-it-all-yourself services. Instead, Render takes care of all the laborious work upfront, minimizing the amount of thinking, reading, and clicking Render customers need to do. This makes it easy to get up and running quickly while simultaneously allowing applications to scale and increase in complexity over time, preventing a transition to DIY infrastructure. For example, during the height of the pandemic, many high-growth startups relied on Render to address rapidly changing business needs. We’re giving precious time back to our customers so they can focus on what really matters to their business.

We rely heavily on customer feedback and treat Render customers the way we'd like to be treated. We read every tweet, respond to questions from our community, and keep track of what our roadmap to be successful on Render. Moreover, all our full-stack engineers participate in both on-call and support engineering rotations. Customer service is core to UX and a big differentiator in a crowded market like ours.

We trust everyone at Change.org to manage their time in the way that best suits their work and personal lives.

As a company, we place a premium on fostering healthy work/life balance, whether you’re working remotely or from one of our offices. All full-time employees receive unlimited PTO. We encourage people to use it and do not expect anyone to be on call or answering emails while taking PTO. In fact, we respect PTO so much that we'll discourage you from doing any work while you're off! We know taking time off is necessary, and the only way to return to work feeling rejuvenated is if you leave work at work. What’s more, the office environment supports flexibility; it’s common for team members to head out to exercise during the day or take care of a personal errand at their leisure. For those working from home, we offer a robust home office setup. All employees are encouraged to request any item(s) and supplies that can help make their work from home experience more comfortable and productive! At the minimum, this includes: a desk chair, a large monitor, keyboard, mouse, and desk.

Our focus on work/life balance makes Change.org a great place for people with children, too. We support mothers and fathers who are going through the everyday ups and downs of parenting by letting them create their own schedule. As an exceptional added benefit, both moms and dads get 18 weeks paid parental leave when a baby joins the family. You’ll often see special appearances of our beloved Change.org kids (and dogs!) popping into the frame on video calls when meetings occur from home.

We believe open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.

Automattic’s roots are open source. Several of our engineering teams actively contribute to open source and view it as part of our four freedoms. As our CEO Matt Mullenweg puts it, “Good ideas aren’t the sole province of groups of people behind high walls, and software shouldn’t be either.”

Of course, WordPress.org is the base of the software used to power WordPress.com. And WordPress.com is synced nearly daily with the WordPress trunk. An Automattic team works full-time on the open source publishing platform WordPress, and we make public our discussions about our work.

We contribute to a number of projects (also including WP for iOS, WP for Android, P2 Theme, BuddyPress, bbPress, WP Job Manager, and WordCamp US), making most of our work available via the GPL.

However, we also understand (thanks to our engineering team’s recent user study on tech hiring) that our open source commitment can be a double-edged sword for some candidates and employees. We recognize the time commitment and open source culture isn’t for everyone and, as Cate Huston, lead of the Developer Experience team wrote, “We’re considering how to improve our messaging on this important value for our company.”

Our customers are talking to us all the time.

Unlike in many B2C companies where you don’t know exactly what consumers are thinking, our customers are talking to us all the time. When they’re giving us the same feedback and pointing out the same things they’d like to see change, it’s obvious what we need to fix. We take customer data seriously when it comes to product development, because we are creating a tool that people interface with directly. By nature, a lot of those interactions are manual, so we aim to make them as accessible and efficient as possible. To do that, our customer operations team tracks their time. For example, we gather data on how much time is being spent on emails or how much time is spent on personalized payroll plans. We share the time-tracking data results in our monthly all-hands meeting. This allows us to make sure we’re prioritizing major feature developments to be as efficient as possible.

We have the freedom to move quickly, make mistakes, and learn from them.

There is a lot of stuff to build. It’s exciting, but some mistakes are inevitable. We strive to create a safe space that’s open to failure. We learn from our mistakes openly and support each other in the process. To foster a safe learning environment, we try to document everything so we and future team members can build off of what we’ve learned (see Open Communication).

For developers, we prioritize building tools along the way to help reduce that risk, like CI/CD, linters, and release automation to help us ensure that a small number of people can be responsible for a large codebase. We do weekly releases to quickly fix bugs that crop up, and invest time to improve the upgrade process for our customers. We pair regularly to share new work and to collaboratively solve tough problems.