We are engineering-driven, engineering-dominant, and engineering-centric.

Our company has 13 employees, 12 of whom are engineers by training. We are building a product in a niche market and we also belong to that market ourselves. Building Kite is technically challenging, so we have to invest in building a high calibre team. As a member of the Kite team, you'll be working with other world-class engineers. When we solve problems, we don’t cut corners and will dedicate the necessary time to uncover the most complete and rock-solid solutions. As a result, our customers can expect all of our products to be built with world-class engineering.

In a lot of ways, we fulfill whatever you’d imagine when you think of 12 nerdy engineers working together.

• Our office is very spacious and quiet, as most people work with headphones in and communicate over Slack.
• Aside from a 10-minute stand-up meeting at 10am every Monday through Thursday, we virtually don’t have any regularly scheduled meetings. (Instead, meetings are scheduled ad-hoc.)
• Our compensation reflects how much we value skilled engineers with a strong CS background, like ourselves.
• Everyone sits in an Aeron chair.

It’s peaceful and quiet at the office, except during lunch (and dinner).

We rarely talk person-to-person, except for during our catered lunch. We’re such a small team that we always spend that hour together. (Three of our engineers are fully remote, so it’s even a smaller group of us.) Dinner arrives at 6:30pm, and we typically end our day eating together. Twice a year, we have a company retreat and tend to have team outings whenever they’re suggested.

We’re in a privileged position to be building a product that, as coders, is made just for us.

The fundamental question that we ask ourselves everyday is: How do we make programmers more productive and efficient? As a team of engineers, this question resonates deeply with us and makes the work that we do more personally meaningful. We are building a tool that we all wish existed. We’re venturing into a relatively new frontier: internet-connected and AI-assisted programming. While this allows us to be extremely creative on the product design side, it also makes each product-level question harder to answer. Fast iteration based on customer-driven interactions a key component of how we operate.

Our team consists of highly motivated individuals that have deep experience in their respective fields.

We strive to combine our extensive backgrounds in search, machine learning, design and other fields with an entrepreneurial drive to form a cohesive team that doesn’t put limits on its ideas. We look to hire individuals who can bring a wealth of knowledge to the table that superlinearly benefits the team. Everyone at Kite has trained hard to become a skilled engineer and views challenging work as the best way to advance our skills. We're good at technology, so we chose to work in a space where there are few others who can do what we do. Take a deeper look at who we are and what our backgrounds are on our team page.

Below: Kite team at the San Francisco Ballet.

Taking full ownership of projects is encouraged and even expected from our team members.

We don’t believe in micromanaging. Instead, we believe that the most efficient way to work together is to allow individuals to have independent control over the projects that they are responsible for. This way, our team members are allowed to grow faster professionally and also develop product-area expertise. You’ll never be handed a problem with instructions on how to solve it, and if you do need this type of management, you probably won’t enjoy working at Kite. Instead, we like to be open-ended in the problems we give.

We value transparency at all levels of our organization because it promotes an open and healthy work environment.

We believe that it’s crucial that all team members understand what our collective goals are and what we are doing to achieve them. In addition, everyone should have access to the information necessary for them to be productive. The only way to achieve these objectives is to maintain a culture where communication happens frequently and information flows freely. Starting at the top, Adam (Kite’s founder) will answer any question you have, how much are we trying to raise and from how, what dilution takes place when we raise, how is raising going? We are also, almost to a fault, incredibly diligent about documentation (we use Quip). It’s an opt-in system and no one reads everything, but the point is that you can search through it to find out whatever you want. What decision was made, when it was made, who was involved in making it, etc. There’s a paper trail for everything.

At Kite, everyone is expected to work hard but not at the expense of their personal lives.

We rock a pretty solid 50-hour work week. We expect our team members to want more than a 9-5 schedule, but we also do not expect them to put in extreme and unnecessary hours. This culture starts from the top, as Adam (our founder) makes it a point to not work weekends. Our Slack is configured to not send notifications after 8pm, which is about what time people leave after eating dinner together.

Below: Kite team at a winery during a company retreat in Sonoma.

In a way, Kite is a place to pursue an advanced education in computer science. You naturally take on new roles once you’ve outgrown your previous one.

We have two managers and one product manager, all of whom moved into these roles after some time at the company. There isn’t a sense of hierarchy (remember, we’re really just a bunch of CS nerds) but rather people gravitating towards whatever new challenge interests them most after they’ve conquered their old ones. We also have two engineers who originally started out with Kite part-time as college students. They started out curating coding examples for us while finishing up their undergraduate degrees at Berkeley and then eventually joined full-time, where they took on more fleshed out roles in what they most wanted to pursue: a full-stack web dev and dev ops. We don’t have a formal mentorship program or clearly defined career tracks, but it’s really a rich environment for engineers to cultivate their skills and choose their own adventure.