Companies that choose to promote from with the company

We champion our own talent and develop our leaders.

Our ideal candidates are passionate about growth and never satisfied with the status quo – and neither are we when it comes to their career growth. There’s no shortage of exciting problems to work on and we give team members as much responsibility as they can take on. If you’re ready for a challenge, we will take all the speed limits off your growth. Gordian is a place where you decide how fast you want to grow your career.

We pride ourselves on promoting leaders from within, and all of our team leads were promoted internally. Daanish is a great example. “I started as an intern and was expected to take on every type of problem. When I came back full-time, the same was true and things only got faster. I built the initial version of our auto fulfillment service and scaled it to over a dozen airlines. I started our content team from scratch with the goal of creating a plug and play service that works with every travel API provider. It’s now one of the most critical parts of our business. I’ve moved on to lead another new effort, Sprout.”

Elevating our own talent is important to us, especially as we grow.

We want to work with great people who are excited about self-improvement both in their personal and professional lives. One way we do that is by offering stipends that can be used toward continuing education, books, and tech conferences. In addition to our annual review process, we encourage shoutouts during all-hands syncs to recognize each other’s hard work. In fact, it’s common for engineers to share demos, so we can shine a spotlight on what folks are working on. We encourage career growth in whichever way allows engineers to feel accomplished, be it as an individual contributor or a move into management. Both Allison and Martin were just promoted during the most recent cycle, while Neha, Chad, Avery, Michael, and Travis were recently promoted to engineering management/leadership roles!

When you grow, we grow.

You are a plank-holder in this company and we are invested in growing our own. Our ideal candidates are passionate about self-awareness and personal growth. Evan started as a Senior Engineer and has since been promoted to Lead Engineer within a year, thanks to his drive to tackle challenging problems and lead technical initiatives on the team. In Evan’s 3rd month at Jane he launched Jane’s product review feature, and has continued to impact the product and cannabis industry!

We want to work with great people who are excited about self-improvement both in their personal and professional lives. If we know someone has a certain interest or passion, we’ll do our best to make sure to involve them on a relevant feature or project. We are 100% bought-in and will always invest in the people who are bought-in, too.

We want you to grow your career here!

As a small but growing team, we still have a flat structure that embraces collaboration, mentorship, and learning. We’re also committed to promoting internal talent who’re interested in moving into people management. Alex is a great example: he progressed into becoming an engineering manager, thanks to his proactive support of the team and emphasis on mentorship.

That said, we recognize that people management isn’t the only way to grow your career. We also support engineers moving into tech lead roles or leveling up as ICs to the equivalent of a principal engineer.

We champion our own talent and want you to grow your career here.

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!

We want employees to grow into leadership roles without a large bureaucracy roadblock.

Our founder highly values folks who can start from the ground up, and wants to help others level-up their careers. Once we feel you are a great fit in your role and have a solid track record within the company, we prefer to promote from within. This gives our employees a quick path to leadership roles without all of the large company bureaucracy that often makes it hard to reach the top. For example, Joy started as the 3rd financial trainer in the company. She raised her hand to take on new projects and initiatives and was rewarded for her hard work – she’s now Head of Trainer Academy. As she puts it, “it’s often a myth that there’s a meritocracy in the workplace, but we really do have that here.”

And she’s not alone – Alicia’s career grew to Chief Operating Officer while Caitlin has become Chief Marketing Officer. There’s a huge opportunity for creative self-starters who want to set and own the trajectory for their career growth.

We aspire to have a good balance between promoting from within and hiring externally.

As we scale, there’s a lot of opportunity to take on new projects, grow your skill set, and level-up in your career. As Matt, one of our engineering managers (who was promoted from within), puts it, “I was first tasked with becoming our expert in Real Time Payments. That grew into a general expertise for all bank integrations. Now I'm managing the team responsible for payments.”

Several other team members have been promoted internally as well. For example, Andy Qin was promoted to engineering manager; Julien and Sean were promoted to senior software engineer. We also like to foster talent from our internship program (see Committed to Personal Growth above) and have extended full-time offers to interns like Aaron and Nisha. Regardless of if you’re just starting out in your career or are further along, we want to help you gain the skills and expertise to get where you want to go.

We’ve promoted five people to leadership roles in the last two years.

As a quickly growing company, we’ve been fortunate to have both the need and the opportunity to promote from within. In fact, several team members were promoted to leadership positions: Steve (Director of Engineering), Faye (Design Lead), Andrew (VP of Sales), Xerxes (Managing Director of Sales), and Sarah (Head of Production Operations). We’ve seen how well it’s worked to develop our own talents’ growth and it’s just the beginning. Don’t hesitate to check out our open roles!

We care about the career trajectory of everyone on the team.

We believe people are the most precious and valuable asset to any company, so it’s no surprise we’re deeply invested in the career growth of all Karateers. In fact, our name underscores this. A “caret” is a symbol (^) used to express exponents. In our case, the caret symbol represents the potential exponential growth of the people we hire and reminds us to walk the walk as a human-centered company. We want to create opportunities for people to grow, and when they do, create roles that can match that growth. During every review cycle we have an active dialogue about who on our team has demonstrated the skills necessary to move to the next level, and what special projects or initiatives we can give to folks to help them achieve their potential. There’s also a strong internal pipeline since many of our staff engineers, like Jason, started as contract interview engineers. Several senior engineers have been promoted from within and we have a path for ICs to develop who don’t want to manage people, while others started as software engineers and have transitioned to management.

We want you to progress in your career here.

While there are a lot of benefits that come from hiring managers externally (who can share best practices and processes), we also care deeply about helping our talent grow both personally and professionally. Mary is a great example. She was one of our first three engineers and now manages our Product Eng team (frontend, fullstack, mobile eng) and has done an incredible job building out a highly empathetic and ambitious team. On the design side of the house, we promoted our first designer, Bing, to lead all things Product and Brand design. That said, there are multiple ways to grow your career and if folks want to level-up as ICs, we support that too! (We’re in the process of rolling out engineering levels to help with outlining and codifying growth paths.) Currently, formal 360 reviews happen every six months. During this time we go through a calibration process with managers, leadership, and the HR team where we discuss every person’s performance review (to help mitigate any bias) as well as their compensation with respect to their performance, market rate, and internal equity.