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 raised a $35M Series B in September 2022, wwhich 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!

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 hired over 130 people in 2022, ending the year at 500+ employees.

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.

We love generalists.

If you’re not an expert in one particular language, that is completely fine! We love engineers who are generalists and have experience with (or interest in) multiple languages and platforms. Be endlessly curious!

While there are tons of opportunities for those interested in depth, there are just as many for those looking for breadth. Instacart is a four-sided marketplace that connects customers, shoppers, retailers, and brands. As a result, there are many opportunities to explore the intersections between our end users. We have unique and complex problems to solve because we focus on how consumer, advertising, ecommerce, and enterprise products interact with one another.

We deploy daily and aren’t afraid to make mistakes.

In order to innovate quickly, we believe in taking measured risks. Not everything will go flawlessly, and that’s okay. Since deployments happen on a daily basis, the longest that anybody is really dealing with the aftermath of a potentially dangerous line of code is 24 hours. Team members are always willing to jump in and help if something doesn’t go as planned and we never place blame on any one person.

When failures do happen, we’re able to speak honestly about what went wrong, and what we can do better next time in our bi-weekly engineering retrospectives. That said, we also have certain guardrails in place, including a solid review and QA process to ensure we’re shipping high-quality code.

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.