Engineering teams that invest in the personal development of their team members

Always learning is one of our core values.

We’re in the business of helping people learn and thrive. Andrew Grauer, co-founder and CEO of Course Hero, was a student at Cornell University and knew how hard it was to find study help that was specific to his classes. He determined there had to be a better way to leverage technology to learn, study efficiently, and do well in school. Thus, Course Hero was born. Course Hero is on a mission to help students graduate confident and prepared.

Fast forward several years, our online learning platform offers over 100 million course-specific study resources contributed by and for a community of students and educators, as well as 24/7 tutor help.

We know that life is multifaceted, and like our students, we aim to help our employees be confident and thrive both inside and outside of work. With the help of our yearly $5,000 educational assistance and tuition reimbursement programs, employees have the opportunity to take continuing education classes and programs in their field. The stipend can be used to pursue additional degrees like an MBA or even certifications that will improve the overall value the employee brings to the team. The stipend can also cover fees for industry conferences where employees can learn from tech leaders and bring insights back to their teams. Last but not least, we organize hackathon events throughout the year to empower teams to innovate and explore new approaches to technologies. Many of our successful product features have stemmed from hackathon projects!

It’s safe to say we are a group of passionate and curious problem solvers who believe in the importance of learning and are excited to help improve the student learning journey every day. If the idea of growing your career with a purpose-driven company piques your interest, let’s chat.

The process is the product.

We’re committed to bringing on the best talent and fostering employee growth internally. Yes, our postings are “jobs,” but we want them to be in the bigger landscape of a career. To that end, we’ll talk about performance plans as early as the interview and hiring process and be explicit in setting expectations.

Our feedback structures are designed to make sure we’re hearing from you regularly. In addition to stand-ups and weekly all-hands, you can expect weekly or biweekly 1-on-1s to ensure you’re tracking toward your personal and professional goals. More formal 360 reviews via Lattice also allow for feedback in all directions.

As co-founders, we (Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie) bring a vast amount of experience. Fouad worked on data infrastructure at Segment (he also has experience in recruiting) and Dan was the first non-Googler to manage a Kubernetes release. While our backgrounds are unique, both of us have worked at companies where we felt a lack of empowerment. We’re now determined to make sure that as Indent grows, not only is every employee able to participate, but they are also actively listened to with the same respect as a founder.

Trade-offs: We’d rather get policies in place for SOC 2 that enable us to build deeper trust with our customers than just race to tack on new features. We believe that sustainable progress is only possible through a sustainable process.

We want you to grow with us.

As a small, but quickly growing team, we place an emphasis on learning as we build. For instance, we have several sets of eyes on pull requests and go through multiple design reviews. Part of this mission is to ensure we’re writing high-quality code, but it’s also so that we can learn along the way. Mentorship is baked into our culture; Kyle (co-founder and CTO) and Jon (principal software architect) are always available to answer questions or support junior devs. We never put a pin in something we don't understand, be it the function of a piece of code or the behavior of a customer interaction. Instead, we care about leaving space for folks on the team to explore and truly understand the changes they’re making. Doing so helps us expand our technical competence and build the best product possible.

As a new engineer on the team, you’ll be exposed to multiple parts of the business. Whether it’s learning more about marketing or sitting in on customer calls and directly participating in customer feedback, there’s ample opportunity to ask questions and flex different skills. To that end, we also emphasize exploring new technologies, architecture, and UIs. We’re not afraid to hit pause when needed to ensure we’re building the right product for the medium- and long-term.

We raised a $3.2M seed round in January 2022 and are looking for folks who are passionate about making an outsized impact in transforming software for hardware developers. If you’re interested in growing your career as an IC, or moving into people management roles, we support both tracks and encourage you to check out our open roles!

We want you to become the best version of yourself both professionally and personally. How can we support that?

We are a team of lifelong learners. Across the board, we seek to learn, both to better ourselves and also sometimes just for the sake of learning. We are curious people who ask a lot of questions! Because of this, we’ve built personal and professional growth into the fabric of the company.

We help each other grow by giving and receiving the gift of feedback across the board – and we like working with people who share our love of thoughtful feedback. This is especially important in code reviews. We have a team that’s focused on getting to the right solution – not on being right – and we enjoy collaborating with others who share that focus. We don’t do egos. We’re all here because we want to make the product (and ourselves) as good as it can be.

We hold company-wide retrospectives every quarter to reflect on how we did as a team, what our big wins were, what could’ve been stronger, and where we can collectively support each other to improve in the future. We also host monthly retrospectives as an engineering team. We use these inputs to try to improve our environment and allow our teammates to do their best work.

We are all also constantly scouring the interwebs to bring the best food for thought to one another in Slack – sharing articles, visuals, music, art, food, memes, and anything/everything else that might be interesting or inspiring. In addition, we cover the membership cost to any museum on the planet, to help you engage in the world beyond.

We deeply understand that everyone has a different idea of what growth looks like – maybe it’s going from an individual contributor to a manager, or maybe it’s taking on increasingly complex and challenging projects. Or, maybe it’s something else entirely. Universe is ever evolving and we are committed to making sure our team members are also ever evolving in life and in work. We are tackling a gigantic undertaking, which means opportunities to expand in every direction – there’s always more to do together, and that’s really exciting.

We’re on a mission to help everyone reach their full potential, one conversation at a time.

As a company dedicated to learning, it should come as no surprise that we practice what we preach. There’s a $1,000 annual learning stipend which team members have used for foreign language classes, software development courses, books on many subjects (i.e. graphic design, finance, AI/ML), and even craft supplies. We also regularly dogfood our own product, so you’ll always find someone willing to teach you something new. Whether it’s educational code reviews, pair and mob programming, working with an intern (we’ve had several repeat interns!), or an engineer learning about sales and marketing – the mentorship limits are endless. You’re not tied to what’s written in your job description, and we always support each other’s goals to grow both personally and professionally. Interested in moving into management? We’ll give you the opportunity to be a lead on a project. Prefer to level up as an IC? We support that, too!

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.

There’s ample room to grow your career.

We’re looking for people who prioritize continuous learning and personal development. If you’re motivated by unseen challenges and ambiguity, you’ll thrive here. Every team member is trusted to tackle business-critical tasks with junior team members given additional support if needed. That said, we’ll never leave you drifting out to sea alone – you’ll always have the full support of everyone on the team.

We purposefully work from our San Francisco office to facilitate faster in-person support and decision-making. Learning is more important than being right, and when mistakes happen, we prioritize learning from them openly and move forward. You should feel empowered to experiment.

If you’re curious about NFTs and aren’t well-versed in the space, don’t let that stop you from applying. As long as you’re eager to learn, we encourage you to check out our open roles. The industry evolves so quickly that you might even find yourself speaking at NFT events within a year!

Senior engineers are servant leaders

Angaza believes so strongly in mentorship that we deliberately scale our hiring rate to our mentoring capacity. If we feel we can’t provide the proper support for our engineers to grow into confident and independent colleagues, then we’ll dial back until mentoring bandwidth increases again.

We expect a lot from our senior engineers. Not only must they make strong technical contributions, but they must actively grow the next crop of leaders. In return, senior engineers have the opportunity to hone their own skills, shape the organization, and have significant impact. They spearhead our most challenging projects and they are given wide latitude when doing so.

More broadly, from frequent pairing to our biweekly engineering practicum, Angaza culture is infused with a commitment to helping engineers maximize their rates of personal growth.

We have a variety of programs dedicated to supporting learning.

Every employee gets a $1500 annual budget to use toward professional development – be it workshops, conferences, online courses, or books. We’ve had engineers use their Pro Dev budgets to attend JAMstack Conference and React Rally, take an Intro to Data Science with R Course, or just read up on best practices for Clean Code and Deep Work.

Two of our own key values are at the core of Upstatement’s Mentorship Program: make each other better and hold the highest standard. The program was created to introduce space and time for meaningful “Upsbud” relationships (especially in remote times), as well as informal collaboration and learning.

The Upstatement Speaker Series consists of Friday Talks that happen roughly once a month. Friday Talks inspire us, help us learn, and allow us to build connections with other communities of creative and technical thinkers. Also, they’re wicked fun! You can check out some of our past speakers on our Events page.

On Fridays when we aren’t hosting an outside speaker, we host internal Friday Shares. The topics change, but can include:

• Design shares
• Engineering shares
• Process shares
• Project shares (of in-progress or recently completed work)
• “Town Halls” on special studio topics

The growth of the company is directly correlated with every Novan’s growth.

Novans can leverage their professional development budget for personal, long-term career growth. For example, Jaime used a part of his budget to attend JSConf in Hawaii and Dave, Jinting, and Rafa are in a tech book club together. Nova also invests in monthly manager trainings, professional events, tools, and resources. You can tap into your network of colleagues on a deeper level by having matched 1:1s with peers and mentors or joining community events, where we've met new friends, accelerated our professional growth, and discussed hot topics.

In the spirit of being an international company serving an international community, Nova encourages employees to take a vacation and explore the world with our anniversary gift. On your Nova anniversary, you’ll get a roundtrip ticket subsidized to anywhere in the world; we believe traveling can be one of the best ways to grow as a person, (emotionally, spiritually, and professionally) through being exposed to how different people in the world live and seeing things. People have used their anniversary flights to visit the Maldives, Thailand, New Zealand, and Greece, just to name a few destinations!

You can see a full list of our benefits here.

Constant learning is baked into our culture.

While we come from different backgrounds and walks of life, it’s safe to say that everyone at Reduct is intellectually curious. We’re passionate about how technology shapes society and cognition and we might just be the only startup that has a media theory book club (where we’ve read Walter Ong alongside Claude Shannon). On our last engineering retreat, we organized a film series that moved from Charlie Chaplin and Elia Suleiman films to an anime survey and an evening watching Twitch live-streams.

We’re always learning from one another and pushing each other to improve. Not only does our open office layout promote the cross-pollination of ideas, but we also make sure to foster transparency and open communication. Our founders regularly share updates on the state of the business. As we grow, there will be more opportunities for engineers to grow both personally and professionally. Paradoxically, our growth is strong both with increasingly professional video production teams as well as amateur and small-scale users. This provides opportunities for learning about scaling a consumer-grade product as well as integrating into the workflow of top video production teams.

You’ll always have someone to learn from here.

A deep sense of curiosity and love of learning bonds us at Zapier. We support mentorship both externally (with a stipend for career coaching) and internally through our PIE (pathway to engineering) path program. Anyone outside of engineering can apply and we take two people every six months. During the first two months, team members continue to do their full-time job (such as customer support) while learning about the engineering org. The next four months are spent with different engineering teams (rotating every month) to learn different parts of the product. Afterward, the person joins engineering full-time. As Stacie, one of our engineering team leads, says, “Our support team members are some of the most brilliant people in the company. They have such a wide lens on our product because they’re helping customers use it every day. It’s fantastic to have them join our engineering team.”

If you’re curious about a certain topic, we have stipends that can be used for books, music, conferences, and courses. Our ERG groups, including Prizm (LGBTQIA+), BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) of Zapier, and Women of Zapier, have funding to learn, grow, and advocate together. We genuinely love getting together to talk and learn, which is why several learning groups – like data book club – form organically.

There’s no one right way to grow your career at Zapier. If you’re interested in people management, we’ll help guide you and give you a trial opportunity (it’s okay if it turns out it’s not for you!). If you prefer to remain an IC, we wholeheartedly support that, too, and can help you uplevel to the principal equivalent. At the end of the day, we want to help you grow both personally and professionally.

People at Modern Treasury share a deep desire to learn and grow.

Our business has grown rapidly – we’ve gone from processing $100M per month in volume to more than $2B per month in the past 12 months. Much of that growth can be explained by how our team tends to be intellectually curious and is excited to push one another in a psychologically safe way. Giving and receiving constructive feedback is important to us and we’re looking for people who likewise have growth mindsets.

One of the ways we feed our collective curiosity is with our weekly Coffee Breaks, which started as a ritual for us to stay connected at the beginning of the pandemic. Each week we invite a guest and have an informal, off-the-record Q&A with them over Zoom. We’ve been fortunate to hear from some really impressive guests, including Charlie Munger and Jessica Livingston.

Another great example is our internship program. Our philosophy is to expect as much from interns as we do full-time engineers, rather than assigning menial tasks or projects that don’t actually ship. Don’t just take our word for it either – here’s what one of our former interns, Nisha, had to say about her experience.

Finally, we offer several benefits to support both your physical and mental well-being, including four months paid parental leave, a $1K stipend to set up your home office, a $500 annual stipend for books, and a $100 monthly open source sponsorship stipend.

Our goal is to get 1% better every day.

We want everyone to experience personal growth while they are here and we make it a point to discuss career growth during 1:1s with your manager. Whether you level up as an IC or move into a managerial role, we can promise there’s no shortage of interesting problems to work on. Local Kitchens is inherently cross-functional as we’re putting operations, technology, and a hands-on food experience under one roof. Our company currently has ~75 people and all of our engineers work directly with non-engineers in some way. You’ll work on a cross functional pod with shared ownership of your product roadmap, launch criteria, and the associated success metrics.

Sai Nadendla, an engineer on our Operational Excellence pod, is a great example. He is working on an algorithm for dynamically setting cook time predictions based on how many orders are currently in the kitchen and where the active bottlenecks in the queue are. This will allow us to a) maximize freshness (by ensuring that food is not sitting out getting cold while waiting for another item to be completed) and b) minimize customer wait times (by enabling us to accurately communicate to the guest when their order will be completed). Sai worked shifts in several kitchens to identify these product opportunities and rapidly iterated on prototypes to quickly gather feedback. "As a software engineer, I find it incredibly powerful and motivating to be able to visit our kitchens and collect direct product feedback. Not only do you get to observe the tangible impact you're making on the guest experience, but also on the efficiency and harmony of kitchen operations as a whole. With our product development cycle, we have the ability to drive our own success and make a real difference in the way we operate.”

We’re doubling down on personal growth.

Engineering managers’ number one priority is to take care of their people, above everything else. This means ensuring direct reports have the resources and the support they need to expand their skills and grow in their careers. We offer a $1,000 professional development stipend that team members can use on everything from online trainings, to books, or conferences, plus five days off paid per year to devote to personal professional development. Moreover, we believe there are multiple ways to grow your career, whether you’d like to level up as an IC or become a people manager. That’s why we’re working on further codifying expectations so that we can tell you exactly what steps you need to take to get where you’d like to be.

From self-organized book clubs, to guilds that align across pods, there are endless ways to learn from and with your peers. We also hold regular demos (where you might find us all wearing fun wigs) to share what we’re working on and host Lunch & Learns. For example, we recently hosted Santiago Papini Ph.D., who spoke about his research on data-driven approaches for personalizing psychological interventions. Specifically, Papini shared how using machine learning models could help find correlations between different mental health conditions such as insomnia and anxiety, with the end goal of figuring out what drivers to act on in order to have the highest impact on alleviating both. Learning more about our domain keeps us excited and motivated.

We are excited by problems that don’t yet have solutions.

As a startup, we don’t know the full scope of challenges we will face. Our team members have a range of different backgrounds and experiences, but we all share an appetite for learning new skills and developing new areas of expertise. Solving problems that are new to both us and the world is exciting and challenging, which is why we’re all bonded by a sense of optimism.

We want to hire people who can scale with the company and grow into technical and people leadership roles. We don’t know for sure what challenges we’ll be facing in 6 or 12 months, so it’s important that we hire for potential.

Whenever possible, we are committed to creating growth opportunities for folks on our team. We don’t have the structured career ladder of a big company, but we do have the flexibility to shape roles and opportunities around individuals. For example, we’ve crafted roles around generalists who want a breadth of experience and those with deep domain expertise. We are supporting engineers who want to grow into people management and those who want to focus on their technical expertise as an individual contributor.

We recognize that career paths are not linear or uniform because many of us didn’t take them. Our goal is to help you gain the skills and knowledge to further your growth and achieve your goals – whatever that may look like to you.

We’re invested in seeing engineers grow professionally and personally.

As a company, we want to make sure everyone joining our team has the ability to personally and professionally grow in their roles over time. When you join PicnicHealth, we start with a 30- and 90-day onboarding and goal setting plan – setting clear goals and expectations with you and your team. We have bi-annual performance reviews to reflect on your contributions, impact, and growth, as well as opportunities for improvement. Working with your manager, you’ll set forward-looking goals aligned with upcoming projects and interests. We want to make sure you’re engaged with the work you’re doing and continuously learning new skills.

We also provide external opportunities to promote your growth, including life coaching, flexible work arrangements (see above), and accommodating different working styles to understand how you get work done best while supporting your work life balance.

Our people are the most important part of Ribbon.

Folks at Ribbon have a wide range of backgrounds, interests, and talents. Some of us have CS degrees while others are self-taught. Some are just starting their careers, while others bring years of experience from small startups and public companies alike. We deeply value having diverse identities and perspectives. In addition to focusing on DEI efforts through recruiting, learning, celebration, and awareness, we’re committed to helping grow our talent internally. Unlike many small startups, we have well-defined core competencies that are openly shared, so you’ll never have to wonder how you can get promoted. Reviews (including raises and promotions) happen twice a year and we also support career development with Individual Development Plans (IDPs) and encourage ongoing conversations with your manager. If you want to attend a conference, buy a work-related book, or expense coffee while meeting with a co-worker, we’re always open to that! For example, Samantha, one of our software engineers, recently purchased this book to learn about data design systems and is exploring a Spark Udemy course.

It’s an exciting time to join the team. We raised a $43.5M Series B in November 2021 and are expanding our reach across health plans, provider organizations, and digital health solutions. That means there are plenty of opportunities not just for new grads (hear what one of our interns turned full-time employees, June Kang, had to say here), but also for senior software engineers who will have the chance to mentor others and help define the roadmap and tools we use to solve real-world problems. As Arik, VP of Engineering, says, “While our next stage of growth is all about scale, it requires investing in a world-class tech team. This means creating an environment where mentally healthy, happy people enjoy the work they’re doing.”

We want to make Ribbon your best career decision, so if you’re passionate about transforming the status quo of healthcare, we’re excited to connect!