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.

You can’t innovate if you’re afraid to fail.

Our success rests on our ability to keep innovation alive at every level of the company. We know that the fastest way to suppress innovation is to make it unsafe to fail, which is why we’ve worked hard to ensure that everyone at Mode is able to take risks. We’ll try something out even if we’re not 100% sure it will succeed because we know that as long as we did the best we could to de-risk it, no one will shame us if it doesn’t work out. In everything we do, we have a “Shared Responsibility, Shared Risk” mentality.

Making it safe to fail requires a blameless post-mortem process, and for that, we have After Action Reviews (AARs). During an AAR, we start with the assumption that everyone did the best they could with the information they had at the time. Participants focus on how to understand and improve the systems and processes that led to the failure, rather than who did what wrong. We use these meetings as opportunities to reinforce that Mode is a safe place to fail, build stronger safeguards against future failures, and bring the team closer together.

Everyone on our team has a real sense of urgency.

We push to production every day. We shift priorities every day or week based on customer needs. We’re a fast-growing company where our growth is ahead of our team size. This may seem chaotic, but it’s by design and helps us avoid the sunk cost fallacy. We’re not afraid to change priorities after gaining new insights or gathering new information. This, overall, helps us move faster as a company.

Our product roadmap and priorities are determined by customer needs every month and prioritized by our founders who own the product responsibilities at NexHealth. We have a north star we follow. We have a 6-month, 1-year, 5-year, 10-years, and 20-year long timeline of what we want to achieve. However, we don’t plan roadmaps beyond 1 month. This allows us to adapt and execute quickly as new information comes in while never losing sight of our north star: we are always working in the same direction of our mission and overall vision for NexHealth.

Speed is our greatest weapon.

We will always prioritize time-to-market and always challenge ourselves to execute faster. While it’s common to hear that you will release code on your first day, we really mean it. Engineers on our team release to production multiple times per day and we tend to work on multiple projects within a single sprint. Sure, there's work that may take a whole sprint to complete, but we’re typically multi-tasking and keeping multiple plates spinning. Not only do we have many workstreams, but we’re also keen on not siloing anyone on a single project. To help stay focused, we regularly use single-week sprints as well.

At present, everyone on our team is a full-stack developer. While most people have front- or back-end preferences and different strengths, we encourage everyone to work across the entire stack.

We’re a small team, so we can quickly change focus and get behind a new problem on short notice and deliver in quick order. Our process supports a maker’s schedule, which we honor every day. To help facilitate speed, we also use CI/CD and have designed our technical infrastructure to bias toward frequent and fast deployments.

Flexport was founded in 2014 and became a $3.2 billion-valued unicorn in 2019 – with only 150 engineers.

In the past year, Flexport opened offices in Seattle and Philadelphia, bringing us to 12 locations and counting! The volume we’re shipping has increased so rapidly that we’ve purchased warehouses in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Shenzhen, and we’ve even leased our own Boeing 747!

We achieved this growth thanks to 150 engineers across four cities and three countries, something we attribute to a carefully designed product cycle that syncs strategically with the business. To keep up with the growing demand, engineers move fast.

When you join Flexport, you will ship code on your first day. You’ll build our product and design flexible, high-quality solutions. To help you understand the broad scope of our mission, you’ll participate in a week-long crash course on the fundamentals of global trade. Your onboarding class will be flying in from offices around the world and consist of people from operations, sales, marketing, product, design, and more. It’s a great opportunity to tap into the cross-functional knowledge of your starting cohort!

Even though we move quickly, we are careful in considering the technical debt we choose to take on.

Dev.xyz provides development support to all the businesses within the XYZ family. The needs of the various businesses we service change regularly so our team is able to react quickly to new situations. Every month is different, and each business gets busy around different times of the year.

There are two areas of business that we focus on. The first is our top level domain operation: we operate the domain extensions .xyz, .college, .rent, .theatre, and several others. The second is a large online marketing operation. We manage 100+ websites around the internet and we have built several robust reporting tools to support the large amount of data coming in through those sites. Most of the maintenance is compliance related (this is ongoing).