We have a bias for action, even if it means making mistakes along the way.

At Leapfin, we deploy daily, work in 1-2 week sprint cycles, and have a high sense of urgency. Decisions to act are always better than indecisions. Sometimes engineers who come from big companies are fearful of making decisions themselves because they’re so used to asking for approval. It’s the opposite here. When you come on board, it’s because we hired you for a reason and trust your expertise, and our expectation is that you take ownership over everything you work on. There’s no red tape to jump through (other than budget approval), so we all get things done fast. While this fast-paced environment inevitably means you’ll make some mistakes along the way, we view them as team mistakes, and always learn from them.

We’re planning to double our engineering team in the next year.

It’s an exciting time to join Lumafield as we emerged from stealth mode in April 2022 and are growing rapidly. Our agility as a small startup allows us to ship quickly and make decisions without a ton of bureaucracy or red tape. Engineers are empowered to propose new ideas, drive projects, and make decisions to move things forward. While it’s safe to say there’s a high sense of urgency, it’s not frantic. We love to ship early and often, then iterate as needed. One of our core values is speed – we believe it’s our greatest advantage and aim to ship products faster for less money than anyone else would dare attempt.

We recently raised a $35M Series B, which will help transform the way engineers and designers work on everything from cosmetics packaging to bike parts. In the next year we plan to double our engineering team. If you’re excited about joining a fast-moving team, we’d love to hear from you!

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.

We have a bias for action.

Authentication is often a frustrating experience for both developers and users. When it comes to the traditional approach, passwords, 65% of users reuse the same one across different accounts. This poses a significant security risk and can create larger breach liabilities. At the same time, people often forget passwords and have to reset them. It can be such a headache that it prevents users from completing an online transaction, costing businesses money and users. While working together at Plaid, co-founders Julianna and Reed realized there had to be a better way to solve this problem. Thus, Stytch was born, with the mission of transforming the space by building a developer platform for passwordless authentication.

We’re growing quickly and believe in learning by iterating and taking bold, but calculated risks. In order to prioritize decisions we ask ourselves, “How impactful is it, and is it reversible?” If it’s something that’s highly reversible, we’ll go for it. If it’s highly impactful and not reversible, we’ll seek out key stakeholders to weigh in.

Last but not least, we do a tiling exercise at the beginning of each quarter to figure out how we can break down our big projects into smaller chunks. Since we send out a change log to our customers every week, this helps keep us accountable and ensures we’re moving as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We’re working to create a billion dollars worth of economic opportunity for moms.

We have ambitious goals and it’ll take agility, flexibility, dedication, and hard work to reach them. While it has always been hard for new moms to reenter the workforce, the COVID-19 pandemic forced women to leave the workforce at a drastic rate. In 2020 alone, women globally lost more than 64 million jobs, costing them at least $800 billion in earnings. We’re working with a sense of urgency to dramatically change this landscape and rewrite the narrative. This means that we’re not afraid to rapidly iterate on our product and shift directions based on our learnings. While we work in quarterly planning cycles, we’ll adjust the roadmap whenever it makes sense and we find it adds more value to the business.

LaunchDarkly ended 2021 with around 430 people, and we’re looking to grow to over 700 by the end of this year.

While scale is important, we also place a high emphasis on a great candidate experience and are transparent about what you can expect throughout our process.

At LaunchDarkly our goal is to change the way every software engineering team deploys their code. We are assembling an unstoppable team of talented people and that begins with a great candidate experience. The first call is with our Talent team, followed by a brief conversation with one of our engineering leaders (or product or design leaders, respectively). Our goal is to learn more about you, your interests, and your skills. And we want to give you the opportunity to discover if LaunchDarkly is right for you.

If you are an engineer applying for an individual contributor role, the next step is a short coding project. This helps us understand how you approach problems as a developer. And it allows you to see the types of challenges our engineers work on day to day. The project you complete will serve as the basis for later steps in the interview.

We then proceed to a virtual onsite interview consisting of:

1. Two verbal technical interviews, covering your background and a system design challenge.
2. A review and extension of your coding project, in which an engineer will review your challenge with you and discuss your implementation. Then you’ll be asked to extend your solution to take on some new requirements.
3. A Values interview, in which we discuss our company and our team values and the values that are important to you in your work.

We’ve built our interviewing process to assess candidates holistically. Once we decide to make an offer, we match the candidate to the team (or squad, as we like to call them) that best matches their interests and the team’s needs. Squads are typically six to eight engineers and each squad works closely with a product manager, product designer, and engineering manager to achieve a distinct mission. We always make sure each of our squads have a mix of senior and junior talent and encourage movement to different squads so engineers can be exposed to different projects and technologies.

You’ll work closely with folks from every other department. We look for people who will thrive working as part of a collaborative, high-performing team. We feel strongly that teams do it better.