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.

We provide and support evolving career paths.

As your career evolves with Brex, you will likely take on a variety of roles and responsibilities. You’ll have the opportunity to work with multiple teams, on multiple projects, perhaps in very different domains or in smaller areas of specialty. While the company at large is committed to the personal growth of all its employees, you’ll also be encouraged by your peers. Everyone at Brex should have a way to grow their careers and expand the impact of their work no matter what role they play. Essentially, there is no “right” way to define your career at Brex, and Thomas Fisher is a great example. He defined what success looked like for him and even open-sourced his career growth template. as we have infinite paths you can take. In one of many other examples, Annie Shin started as a Senior Software Engineer at Brex, transitioned to Technical Lead Manager, and then became an Engineering Manager all within her first 11 months. As she says, “there are so many amazing female leaders and managers here at Brex to learn from” and the company’s growth ensures that you will never run out of opportunities to grow with it.

When you join Brex, you will have the resources and tools you need to grow your career in whatever way suits you best. Here are just some of the ways in which we support growth at Brex:

• Brex Career Paths: Growing your career at Brex begins with knowing your current role, identifying where you want to go, and defining what success looks like for you whether that’s transitioning into another role, acquiring a new skill, or contributing to a specific type of work. From here, employees chart a path of where they currently are and how they are going to reach their desired outcome. Sometimes this includes the expert track, people management, or something in between. For instance, Moraya Cleary spoke up early on about her passion to move in a more analytical direction with her career. While she was initially hired in a non-technical, non-eng role, both her manager at the time and other stakeholders supported her. As Moraya says, “While the team could have started hiring data scientists significantly my senior with ease, and pass up the significant commitment to an internal transfer, engineering leadership took a shot on me. I was given the space to drink through the fire hose and transition to a role as a data scientist.”
• Coaching & Mentoring: We provide hands-on experiences via pods or 1-on-1 mentoring focused on employee success, community, diversity & inclusion, and career progression.
• Learning Experiences: Get monthly learning stipends to spend on courses/books, conference ticket expense coverage, and LinkedIn learning! We also host company-wide design review sessions, engineering open houses, and paper readings, which can truly add another dimension to your technical growth. Each option allows you to absorb far more than you would in your day-to-day work.
• Self-Assessments: We lean on introspection to help us grow. Employees have ample resources and tools that help them take charge of their own professional development to build a stronger sense of self-awareness and team connection.

We love learning and exploring new ideas.

At HumanFirst, we welcome folks from all backgrounds. In fact, our CEO, Andy, has a BSc in economics and transitioned to engineering thanks to an immersive bootcamp course. She worked as a software engineer at Akili Interactive, a digital therapeutics company, and at Instacart, where she supported at-home deliveries. Combined with her prior work in consulting and private equity, Andy was intrigued by the shifts she was seeing across the at-home clinical trials and care environments to better serve patients. When she left the FDA in 2019, she raised a seed round for HumanFirst to build an MVP of their decentralized clinical trials platform, which the team launched a year later in January 2020. Two months later, COVID hit the U.S., and there was a massive shift toward at-home research. We raised a Series A in 2021, and we’re now scaling our products to support more human-first research and care.

We commit to each and every one of our team member’s personal growth, and this extends beyond traditional professional development. For example, we have an executive coach on retainer for full-time teammates who would like bi-monthly coaching (or they can also choose to work with their own executive coach). We also have 360 performance reviews every six weeks (ask us why!), stipends for conferences and/or training, home office setup reimbursement, and the list continues to grow!

We hold tech talks every Friday, where a team member will share something new and interesting they’ve been learning lately. Recent topics range from parallax animation, to printing a PCB board, to deploying ML models in production. These tech talks are supplemented by a monthly technical reading club, where we read papers or books to do a deeper dive into a specific technical topic. We put all of these ideas into practice with a quarterly hackathon: this is an opportunity to build something fun and new outside of the confines of normal day-to-day work. Often, these projects end up being huge successes for our team and work their way back into our core products.

Last but not least, every quarter, our teammates build individual objectives and measurable goals (OMGs) – which other orgs sometimes call ‘OKRs’ – that align with both professional and personal values. On the professional side, each teammate works with their group to build out their own goals and KPIs (e.g., engineering, product, operations, research team) for the quarter. We also support teammates to build personal OMGs, and we regularly check in with teammates during their 1:1s, which they set with their team leads or Andy every week. (Want more examples of OMGs? We are inspired by the Measure What Matters framework.)

Although our teammates live across the globe, we come together regularly. This has of course shifted during COVID-19, though we plan to continue this tradition when it’s safe to do so.

Constant learning is baked into our culture and calendar.

We help each other grow personally and professionally every week, anchored by Feedback Fridays. We each have 2-3 core personal goals at any given time, and every Friday we share open and honest feedback on what we’ve seen from our teammates – we aim for 1 ‘Plus’ (good work) and 1 Delta (way to improve) per person each week.

There is no hierarchy, no judgment, and no evaluation. This session is purely about helping each other constantly improve and maintaining a team culture focused on growth rather than ego.

Everyone on the team has budget each year for learning and education, as well as for travel to conferences, engaging with the community, and building leadership in a domain.

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 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 believe learning never stops.

Despite coming from various backgrounds, everyone at Seesaw shares one thing in common: we all love learning. Not only is our product dedicated to enhancing learning, but we are also committed to growth and development as individuals and as a team.

A great example of how we demonstrate personal development is through our internship program for individuals pursuing a career in engineering. Unlike most companies where internship programs are largely run by engineering managers, our engineers drive Seesaw’s entire process from start to finish. It is a great opportunity for engineers (who may not have experience with hiring or managing) to identify which projects the interns work on, design appropriate interview questions, shadow one another during interviews, and ultimately make the decision about which applicants to extend offers. Independent contributors (ICs) get the chance to onboard and manage interns, and everyone gains a deeper understanding of what recruiting and hiring entails. While we are only in our third year, we’ve found this unique, engineering-driven internship program to be successful for everyone involved and we plan to continue evolving the program.

To further support professional development, we also offer educational stipends ($500 per year), for all Seesaw employees. In the past, folks have used their stipends to attend conferences, take online courses, or purchase books. We also take advantage of how knowledgeable our colleagues are and regularly host Lunch and Learns where team members can lead a presentation or discussion around a topic of their choice. Recent examples have included Understanding Equity and Stock Options, Advocacy (how to be an advocate for others), and Owning Your Career Growth.

We’re looking for people who don’t just want to simply climb the ladder, but are passionate about how they’re growing and developing. If that sounds like you, we highly recommend you learn more about how Seesaw enables K-12 students to better engage with both their teachers and parents and also learn more about the team behind it.

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!

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.

Everyone learns a little bit differently, and we’re always learning on the side.

At Monograph we provide a wide range of ways to further your growth: educational stipends (up to $1,000 per year), regular tech talks (Coffee+Cookie+Code), Jam Sessions where we build something together, or our favorite Show-n-Tell where you can showcase your latest side project.

Employers typically discourage their employees from working on side projects, or at least it seems as if people are shy to share this information with their managers and coworkers. The fact is Monograph started as a side project, so of course we encourage you to work on something on the side!

A few side projects from our team:

• So Hydrated - Internal tool to track our hydration challenge (Dan)
• Architecture Dictionary (Daniel)
• Raised Water Research (Pete)
• Lorem Ipsum (Alex)
• CSS Gradient (Moe)

Despite all of the great resources we do provide, the reality is we can’t give you everything you need professionally. With a 4-day workweek, our team uses some of their extra time off to level-up in other ways, whether that’s sitting on leadership boards, taking classes, prototyping a new technology, or going on long hikes to reset mentally.

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.

It is important to us that every engineer sees their path forward, not only at Rune, but also in their career overall.

Some folks haven't quite figured it out, and that's ok. We try to help by making it very feasible to be able to change teams, change what part of the stack you focus on, and what kind of technology you're exposed to, until something resonates with you.

While we're still on the smaller side, we have an internship program and engage every year with university career fairs. We encourage everyone to participate in the community, and will sponsor engineers to represent the company at public speaking events and in underrepresented communities. We also pair every engineer with a mentor from the senior staff, who helps them advance at their own pace to take on more responsibility and harder projects.

We're tackling some very hard technology at scale and complexity that many other companies aren't facing. That said, if you’ve never worked on these systems before, it’s not a barrier. Rather, we focus on hiring people that are committed to improving and learning the best way to do things, not just the fastest. We teach others how to design architecturally before we ever hit code, how to address scalability both on paper and empirically, how to predict and mitigate failure modes and security concerns, how to think about the infrastructure supporting your code, how to make responsive and interactive data analysis tools in the browser, and how to create mobile applications that are hyper aware of users affected in very different ways by neurological conditions such as movement, depressive, or compulsive disorders. If this sounds interesting to you and you’re excited about learning more, we’d love to hear from you!

We always ask, “What can we do to make you happier?”

We are building something that’s fundamentally new, and in a nascent space that’s rapidly evolving. There’s no playbook for how things should be done, so it’s imperative we remain highly curious, learn continuously, question assumptions, and think from first principles. Insatiable curiosity motivates us both at work and in our daily lives. That’s why one of the fun perks of working here is you can expense any book you’d like (even personal ones). We have socials every two weeks where different people share deep dives and lead discussions around various topics. We’ve done everything from presentations on mental models to bike riding to linguistic relativity, as well as games (e.g. Among Us) and Airbnb Experiences.

We also make it a point to ask in 1-on-1s, “What can we do to make you happier?” Sometimes people are facing something personal and decide to share. Other times it might be work-related (lately the answers seem to hover around needing more help... hint hint, we’re hiring!) In general, we are firm believers in personal happiness, life outside of work, and self-care. Multiple members of our team have families and small children (family first!) and both of our founders are regular meditators (Chandan is currently at 40 minutes/day with a goal to get to a five day silent meditation retreat).

We share an everybody can win mindset and embrace mentorship.

The engineering team places a premium on mentorship and teaching. Prior to becoming CHANI's Director of Engineering, Milcah was an Instructor Associate at General Assembly, and he brings a lot of the skills and tools they honed and gathered as a bootcamp instructor to CHANI. Leads are encouraged to grow as mentors for junior developers. We also host Tech Talks, where contributors teach a one-hour module on a technical subject they are passionate about. Previous talks have ranged from how to effectively communicate as a technical leader to intros to Swift and Xcode.

During our Sprint Retrospectives, each contributor gives direct feedback regarding ways we can improve as a team. We also review individual commitments we've made during the previous sprint, hold ourselves accountable to whether we accomplished them or not, and then set new commitments for the next sprint. During Sprint Reviews, we encourage team members to give each other "glows" and "grows," areas in which they excelled and areas of potential growth. Similarly, we encourage contributors to give each other personalized feedback during one-on-ones.

In a workplace where you are encouraged to be your full authentic self, we understand that your experiences, interests, and skills go beyond what fills a one-page resume. The depth and breadth of who you are, and what you have to contribute as a team member, is not only celebrated – it’s actively encouraged to grow. Whether you want to take on a new project, learn a different part of the stack, remain an IC or move into people management, we recognize there are multiple ways to grow your career. One way we do this is with a dedicated annual stipend for personal and professional growth. At the end of the day, our goal is to give you the power and support to explore your skills and help you form a role that continues to explore and challenge them.

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 manager training, professional events, tools, and resources and provides access to an extensive network you can tap into. You can leverage our network by having matched 1:1s with peers and mentors or joining community events, where we've met many 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 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! During the pandemic, we also made the anniversary gift available as a bonus or as an Airbnb booking credit, for those who prefer not to fly.

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.

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.

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 ~30 people and all of our engineers work directly with non-engineers in some way. You’ll own your own product roadmap, launch criteria, the associated success metrics, and likely find yourself presenting in our Weekly Business Review and Weekly Product Reviews.

Eduardo Baik, who leads our KitchenOS team, is a great example. He is actively working on two exciting technical challenges. The first is 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).The second challenge is a real-time menu inventory system that will collect low inventory counts from our kitchen and automatically mark items out of stock as sales come in. This will make sure that our web, mobile, and kiosk always reflect accurate inventory and prevent us from overselling orders we can’t fulfill.

Eduardo worked shifts in several kitchens to identify these product opportunities and rapidly iterated on prototypes to quickly gather feedback. “As a software engineer, I think it is very powerful and motivating that we are able to visit our kitchens and collect direct product feedback. You are able to see the impact that you are making not only for our guests, but also for our cooks, kitchen managers, greeters, and every person in the kitchen.”

We have a long-term commitment to new learning and every new hire gets a buddy and mentor.

We’re a very experienced team, much more so than the average startup, and we all regularly take on new roles and learn from each other. We’re committed to personal growth out of necessity, and also because we love it in our own lives. On a small, start-up team, you need people willing to try everything, and the team needs to create a safe place for people to try new things. We couldn’t get everything done any other way.

When you first join our team, you’ll be set up with Treasury Prime U, our suite of online classes that serve as a deep dive into all things Treasury Prime. You’ll also be matched up with at least one buddy based on what we learn about you during our hiring and onboarding process. New employees meet one-on-one with their buddy every week. These meetings are just to run through the events of the day/week, and are often done via short Zoom calls. We also offer a $1000 annual professional development stipend and invest in company-level leadership training. At the end of the day, we’re invested in helping team members grow their careers here and want you to develop the skills and knowledge needed to get you where you want to go.

Structured career development starts on day one.

At Minerva Project, we place a strong emphasis on professional development. This begins with a structured 90-day onboarding, which includes a plan for shipping code during week one. By day 90, you’ll have a comfortable foothold on one (or more) of the products outlined in your professional development goals and will be working with your manager to line those up with pods and projects.

The relationship with your manager is a two-way street. You should feel comfortable to regularly discuss potential areas for growth so your manager can advocate for you to take on appropriate stretch projects. You and your manager will regularly revisit your professional development goals. Just like we split product planning into multiple chunks during the year, we have multiple layers of professional development from high level year long goals to per project initiatives to make clear how your efforts at Minerva will grow your career.

We also have a budget to expense any technical book needed to help you learn more and a tuition assistance program of $3K per year for professional development events such as conferences, trainings, and workshops. For example, our teammates have been involved with Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), PyCon, and more. We also run internal book clubs and workshops, with recent examples including book clubs on The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier and Switch by Dan and Chip Heath, and an introduction to Docker and Kubernetes workshop.

Staff and faculty at our all-company event in 2019.

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.

Grow with us.

We invest heavily in a thorough 30-60-90 review process for new hires. We want everyone who joins our team to set goals and have a clear plan for how their first three months at Sparrow will go. We also do regular 360 reviews on Lattice. They’re not tied to compensation, but do focus on areas of growth and how you can level up. We believe there are many ways to grow your career. If you want to level up as an IC, we fully support that. Or if you’re excited about the potential of moving into management, as we continue to grow we’ll have opportunities there, too. Whether you’re a frontend engineer who’s interested in backend, would like to gain deeper expertise on architectural decisions or own larger swaths of the product, there are several ways to flex your skills here.

As a remote-first company, we rely heavily on written documentation and make sure to provide new hires with written training material around feedback (i.e. learning to identify switch tracking in difficult conversations) and opportunities to discuss with others in their onboarding cohort. We also encourage mentorship and every new hire is matched with an onboarding buddy. It’s safe to say we take our onboarding and training very seriously!

We also learn a lot from working with one another. Engineers often pair ad-hoc and touching each other’s code helps us all improve. After standups, we often dive deeper into a particular technical issue, and anyone on the team is welcome to join. Once a week, we have Weekly Tea(m) Time on Wednesdays. We invite five people together, have three questions (as prompts), and get to know one another through conversation. Our team members come from a wide variety of backgrounds (ranging from massage therapy to environmental law). You can also learn about our favorite TV shows, weekend activities, and what inspired us to join Sparrow on our blog.