Lever was founded nine years ago to tackle the most strategic challenge that companies face: how to recruit and hire top talent. We’re building the next generation of hiring software that companies like Netflix, Atlassian, KPMG, and McGraw-Hill Education rely on to grow their teams. We’ve rethought the talent acquisition paradigm and are the innovation leaders in our space and looking for the right people to join us as we scale.
Job Openings at Lever
Top Engineering Values
Each team is asked to select, explain, and rank their top 8 values in order of importance.This plays a big role in how people at Lever interact with one another. We’re looking for team players who have empathy for the particular challenges of a given role or team. Any time there’s a challenge, we always make the assumption that everyone is doing their best and lean in to support one another rather than pointing fingers.
As an engineer, you can expect to work closely with the customer support team to learn about any pain points our customers are facing or bugs that need to be fixed. You’ll also interface with project managers (who set the tasks and organize the team), project owners (who do the research to come up with what the feature will be), as well as designers. If an issue can’t be easily resolved in Slack, we’re quick to hop on a huddle call to help move things forward. You should feel empowered and comfortable to reach out to anyone in any department if you need help or more information.
At the end of the day, while technical skill is important, we prefer candidates who can communicate what they’re working on and bring everyone on board.
We’re transforming the hiring process by allowing companies to easily manage their talent pipeline from one, centralized location. Our customers include everyone from early-stage startups to public companies and we’re all united by the goal of making sure they are all happy and successful. Feedback from customers is openly shared in a Slack feedback channel and we also have a customer advisory board that meets regularly. Similarly, when thinking about new features and tools, our product team will often meet with customers to share demos and get early feedback. This feedback drives the engineering roadmap and we make sure to prioritize the features and upgrades that are most impactful for our customers. For example, we recently shipped a feature where candidates could opt-in at the end of their interview to answer a short diversity survey. Questions could include answering whether they were a veteran or identified as male, female, or gender-non-conforming. However, this didn’t work for every company, since in places like Germany, it might be more culturally acceptable to ask the prior question but not the latter, whereas in the US companies might want to have both questions on their survey. Thus, we shipped a change so you can configure a different survey based on the candidates’ location (and not just the job location).
We’re constantly listening to our customers and strive to maintain a balance of building new features and improving others as efficiently as possible.
While we have two HQ offices in San Francisco and Toronto, we also have many team members across the U.S. who work remotely. With our new hybrid policy, folks will have the option to go into the office if they’d like, or work remotely in certain approved states. Ideally, we try to optimize for overlapping hours as much as possible (9am-2pm PT), but there’s a great deal of flexibility for engineers to get their work done however suits them best. For example, some people like to work from 7am-4pm, while others prefer to start their days later and end a little later. Want to pick up your kids from school? Go for it! We all have commitments, hobbies, and passions outside of the office and trust you to manage your schedule.
Everything we do is team based. We focus on aligning around team goals throughout projects, which means we’re incentivized to give and receive help (pairing, mentoring, whiteboarding, unblocking tickets, etc.) over focusing on solo hero work. When we’re in the office, our two dedicated pairing rooms (called Pairadise) are often occupied.
Collaboration also prevents us from creating silos of knowledge. It facilitates information sharing and there are many “game-changing” instances where one person’s good habits or use of an awesome tool gets shared across the team to everyone’s benefit.
Above all, we are big believers of succeeding and failing together as a team. We celebrate feature launches with a physical trophy ceremony where the team presents who built what and why. They then place a small token that represents the project in a glass case with white gloves, music playing, and all the pomp and circumstance a feature release deserves.
There’s a good reason folks at Lever tend to stay here. As Christina (a senior software engineer) says, “there’s a very positive culture here, where you don’t have the ‘10x developer.’ Everyone is collaborative and supportive.” We regularly make space for team bonding, whether it’s in-person (when it’s safe to do so of course) or virtually. For example, we got creative with remote activities like team cooking challenges, book clubs, talent competitions, and more. Our CEO even taught a class on baking bread.
We’re extraordinarily proud of the company we’ve built so far (not to mention humbled to be recognized as the #1 place to work in San Francisco, as well as a top workplace in the entire United States). Our people are Lever’s biggest competitive advantage and we’ll continue investing in our “Leveroos” and people-first culture.
We do not build ad-based consumer software, our product is our value. Our reputation as a company is based on having the best product in the industry, and we have never strayed from being a product-focused company. We’re proud of what we’ve built, and naturally, we are big users of our own product.
Not only is Lever committed to making a high-quality product, but we also want every team member to be able to connect their personal contributions to the overall business. Results from our most recent R&D Engagement survey showed that 100% of Lever employees understand how their work impacts Lever’s goals. It’s easy to feel connected to our product, and maybe more importantly, easy to see how your work contributes to making it better.
We pride ourselves on making sure everyone is engaged in work that is both fulfilling and challenging. Whether you want to grow as an IC or move into people management, our goal is to understand where you want to go in your career and help you gain the exposure and experience to get there. This starts even before you join the team, since part of our interview process includes a discussion about your career trajectory so we can understand what is important to you and help set you up for success. We’ve had engineers move up who started as interns from bootcamps and others who changed industries entirely.
In addition to regular performance reviews every six months, we always look internally first to see if there’s a good fit before kicking off a new role. In fact, we have a company-wide goal to fill 25% of new roles with internal candidates, and just in the last six months we’ve filled 37% of our roles internally!
As a company that makes recruiting software, we believe diversity at Lever starts with hiring. We have carefully designed our interview process to mitigate bias by training every interviewer and balancing the skillsets we hire for. We pair technical interviews with ones that focus on how candidates work on projects with others, run mock code reviews, and give and receive feedback.
Just looking at the stats:
Beyond the numbers, we also represent a diversity of professional backgrounds (four-year CS programs, bootcamps, entirely self-taught, and pretty much everything in between). Before Lever we were teachers, product managers, FBI security experts, and designers. We came to Lever with different experiences, communication styles and preferences. As a result, our team has worked towards having better overall communication practices that ensure that everyone can effectively communicate and work well with one another.
Lever has a flexible vacation policy. We trust everyone to make the best decisions about when to take off and recharge and to get a ‘thumbs up’ from their managers and teammates to make sure projects continue smoothly.
Lever uses our own open source real-time framework called Derby that syncs all data via Operational Transformation. OT is the way we handle concurrency conflicts for any piece of data that is edited at the same time. In addition to real-time sync, OT allows us to provide a smoother UI since we can render updates on the client instantly without waiting for our backend to respond, while still guaranteeing consistency.
Lever makes extensive use of AWS, Docker, Node, Mongo, ElasticSearch, and Redis within our infrastructure. We use tools like Hubot to streamline deployments and Datadog to see what’s going on under the hood. In addition to automating all the things, we love to version them too! Our systems are all created using Terraform and Chef, working together to ensure consistency at all costs.
Blog post on our hiring process
Interviews include a project interview, pair programming session, code review, hiring manager conversation, and a career trajectory interview with your recruiter. We care just as much about how you work with other engineers as we do about your technical skills, and our interviews are set up to get a broad and complete view of you and your skill sets.