Engineering at Render

Render is a cloud platform built by software developers for software developers.

We’re solving a problem we’re intimately familiar with, giving our product and business a unique edge. Traditionally, when deploying applications in production, developers are forced to pick between two extremes: expensive yet simplistic platforms, or complicated, do-it-all-yourself services. Instead, Render takes care of all the laborious work upfront, minimizing the amount of thinking, reading, and clicking Render customers need to do. This makes it easy to get up and running quickly while simultaneously allowing applications to scale and increase in complexity over time, preventing a transition to DIY infrastructure. For example, during the height of the pandemic, many high-growth startups relied on Render to address rapidly changing business needs. And when Heroku ended its free tier, we made it easier than ever to migrate apps over to Render. We’re giving precious time back to our customers so they can focus on what really matters to their business. This clear product-market fit has enabled us to scale quickly – with over 10.5B requests served monthly and 1M+ services created; we’re not slowing down.

We rely heavily on customer feedback and treat Render customers the way we'd like to be treated. We read every tweet, respond to questions from our community, and keep track of what our users need to be successful on Render. Moreover, all our full-stack engineers participate in on-call and support engineering rotations. Customer service is core to UX and a big differentiator in a crowded market like ours.

We’re intentional about creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.

We know employing a team rich in diverse lived experiences allows our employees, our product, and our community to flourish. We recognize diversity is more than the common categories of gender, race, and physical ability.

While we could rattle off a list of boxes our team checks, to us, diversity is more complex than a box – boxes don't account for intersectional identities, nor does seeking a specific number within each box help individuals thrive once they've arrived in our organization: that's where inclusion and belonging come in. We also reflect on our processes regularly to incorporate feedback and address evolving needs. So, here's how we show up:

• A thoughtful and respectful hiring process. This is not a gatekeeping exercise: we actively seek new perspectives to learn from, regardless of background. We aim to represent daily responsibilities in our questions and exercises. We do our best to ensure you feel comfortable enough to show us your strengths. We are flexible where possible to account for different life circumstances. We expect this to be a mutual process where you are interviewing us as well.
• Structured onboarding. We iterate on this with every new hire, but we approach onboarding like interviewing: deliver clear expectations with the requisite support (i.e. dedicated onboarding buddies) and maintain a welcoming environment to ensure success. We value new hires not only for their ability to help grow the business, but also because they're in the best position to draw attention to outdated processes, missing documentation, or needed context.
• Open lines of communication to leadership. It's not just that leaders make themselves available to employees – they are actively engaged. Render's leaders offer transparency into company challenges, wins, and seek input within and outside their area of expertise. Learn more about our leadership team:
  • CEO: Anurag Goel
  • VP of Engineering: Uma Chingunde
  • VP of Product: Meagan Gamache
  • VP of People: Alison Baritot
• A commitment to compensation parity. Our leadership regularly reviews and compares internal compensation to market data. Fairness is an important principle for us and this ensures we maintain consistency between new and existing Renders in the same role.

Renders are incessantly curious about technology and people.

Two of Render's core personal attributes drive our unified commitment to personal growth: Continuous Learning and Candor with Empathy. We sustain world-class performance by picking up concepts and ideas quickly and as needed. We believe in a growth mindset and in providing an environment where everyone can learn and thrive.

You'll have the opportunity to accelerate your own growth by working at a small startup like ours. We encourage you to try new things and gain experiences unavailable in larger organizations (see our Start-to-Finish Ownership and Safe Environment to Fail sections for more). Here are a few ways we support personal growth:

• We sponsor work-related training, conferences, workshops, and resources. Case in point: 100% of our full-stack engineering team completed the Kubernetes Administrator course and are now certified.
• We follow a highly collaborative process. All projects are well-staffed and deliberately cross-functional to allow collaborative learning – a typical project will involve someone from the full-stack, design, user experience, and support teams.
• We use a lightweight review process. This is true across all stages of our product life cycle – from design documents to code.
• We are feedback-driven. We value taking the time to give each other consistent recognition and feedback through various channels including Slack, team meetings (where we all reflect on the week's highs and lows), and a blameless incident review process.

Failure and mistakes are healthy as long as we're making new ones.

If we're not failing at all, we’re not taking enough risks or pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones. Being eventually correct is much better than being consistently incorrect, and we focus on getting to the right answer through reflection and discussion, instead of trying to be right the first time. We know we’ll make mistakes along the way, but we believe each failure should be examined dispassionately, objectively, and without blame. Instead, we treat each misstep as an opportunity to improve. An environment of mutual trust and respect empowers us to debate ideas effectively and create the best outcomes for our customers and our team.

Listen to our VP of Engineering, Uma Chingunde, share her strategies on how to cultivate a blameless culture here.

Whether it’s spearheading a feature or helping with hiring initiatives, you’ll own every project you take on.

We’re a small company comprised mostly of engineers grouped into six different teams. The support team provides our customers with hands-on engineering help and expertise. Infrastructure is responsible for building and scaling Render’s platform for security and reliability. Security focuses on all aspects of resilience and protection of sensitive data, as well as adhering to international security, privacy, and compliance standards. Datastores owns our managed Postgres and Redis products and other customer-facing data products. Services owns the core of setting up and running user Services, signup/in, first run experience, billing, and much of the Dashboard. Last but not least, environments allows larger and more sophisticated users to configure complex combinations of Services via Environments, Blueprints, and Projects.

Check out our blog to see what we’ve been working on!

We take pride in maintaining a high quality code base.

Central to our values of high integrity and a sustainable work culture, we invest in keeping tech debt to a minimum and maintaining a high quality code base from the beginning. Doing so not only keeps our on-call rotation reasonable, but it also limits the time we spend fixing broken or flaky parts. This means we can focus the majority of our time on feature development for our customers. To ensure a high quality code base we:

• Review all code changes, at a minimum by two peers.
• Have a mature product lifecycle where larger projects have scoping, design, user feedback, and implementation phases – each of which requires peer feedback.
• Continuously triage and prioritize our feature and bug backlogs.
• Implement a blameless but thorough and educational incident review process.

Shipping is our heartbeat.

We have built a continuous integration system and strongly believe that our shipping velocity differentiates us from our peers. As an engineer, you can expect to push to production multiple times a day. We have a lightweight process to ship through the different stages of our pipeline and no explicit separate release is needed.

We also run a mature test suite on all code commits, which we monitor continuously with failures fixed within a certain SLA. Tests take minutes to run with an expectation that they should be fast, reliable, and not the long pole to pushing features.

Check out our roadmap, which we recently introduced to detail features as they are rolled out. We keep a tight feedback loop with our users, and build all features with them in mind.

Render is a place where you can grow your career.

Commitment and ownership are core qualities you'll find in each of us, which is part of why Render is a place where people want to stay and grow their careers. We strive to create a supportive work environment based on mutual respect and continuous learning through regular 1:1s, team meetings, and Slack discussions driven by empathy and candor. We also offer an equitable compensation model. This includes regular compensation parity reviews, employee-friendly stock option exercise windows, and generous benefits for you, your future, and your loved ones. Finally, we’re in this for the long run, which means placing a premium on managing work/life balance. We take care of ourselves and actively make sure we keep the pace sustainable to avoid burnout. We raised a $50M Series B in 2023 and are continuing to grow the team. If you're excited about joining a startup where you can expand your skill set, we’d love to hear from you!