We value creativity in everything we do.

When faced with a challenging issue, employees are expected to propose more than one possible solution. Not only does this process stimulate the brain, but it eventually leads to creative solutions to challenging situations. We strongly believe that creativity feeds innovation and we would like to believe this is reflected in our product portfolio as well. We value creative thinking whether we’re evaluating a feature/app, making decisions that cost resources, or evaluating a potential hire. This is why we always ask candidates to tell us about a time when they overcame adversity against all odd, with very little resources in their favor. We value creative thinking and problem solving, and actively look for these attributes when interviewing prospective candidates.

Dev.xyz’s foundation has been built through collaboration between technical experts and creative minds.

From proprietary cybersecurity tools to microsites designed in 3D, we challenge our team members to develop new technology that ultimately makes the internet a safer and more closely connected community. That’s why you’ll always see the floor-to-ceiling whiteboard walls throughout our open office covered in diagrams and notes. It’s also why we encourage developers to start their own projects and launch MVPs for testing and collaborative feedback. This gives everyone the freedom to pursue new ideas while inspiring others to develop their own innovative solutions.

Our company is always looking for new and innovative ways to solve problems. The mission behind the .xyz top level domain is to bring innovation to the internet by cultivating the online community. Dev.xyz is no different.

We fully support individual creativity and even encourage team members to take on personal development projects.

Many of our engineers work on side projects in their spare time. Some develop games while others work on audio synthesisers, and many more interesting projects. We even have a guy called Dan who is writing his own language and compiler just for fun. We cherish individual creativity and people with innovative ideas, and we find that these are the types of people who really shine at Atlas. On more than one occasion, the side projects people work on in their spare time have helped us solve problems that come up in developing business applications.

We also always use the latest technology here at Atlas. When we start a large project and know the target release date, we sometimes use technologies that are still in beta if we know they will be RTM before the planned release date. An example of this is ASP.Net Core. Taking this approach can sometimes lead to some pain early on in the development cycle, but it gives our developers valuable experience and also gives our customers a final product with a longer support life.

Impossible is nothing for our team.

We were originally told that building a cross-browser extension that would work across the web would be impossible. Our browser plugin now works in all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and even Edge), and this was done with just a handful of engineers. See our tech blog article about it here.

Engineers are a critical part of our product development process. Every year, we have two full-day hackathons for engineers to prototype and develop whatever they want, and Hackathon projects often become the basis for new feature development. Projects have ranged from a sentiment analysis feature for text, to a blazing fast autocomplete feature, to virtual reality features.

We also heavily rely on the ingenuity of our engineers for some of our most critical in-house tools. For example, when we outgrew the basic functionality provided by third-party tracking tools, a team of two engineers built our own product metric tracking and querying dashboard from the ground up. Similarly, when out-of-the-box third-party A/B testing tools were not customized enough for us, we built our own framework for running tests.

We strive to foster and incorporate engineering creativity. That’s why every other Friday for us is a fun day –– a time to explore new tools and technologies, read up on the latest industry news, and hack up widgets and tools just for fun.

We love "impossible."

We embrace the “impossible” as a chance to grow and be challenged. The harder the problem, the more confident we become in our technology and solution. We look at every problem as an opportunity to innovate and lead. We are working to transform local brick-and-mortar stores into an online localized marketplace by directly integrating into the stores’ Point-Of-Sale systems. We are the Amazon of online weed shopping, if you will. We also have a patent for this technology, that is not specific to cannabis.

We pride ourselves on being able to develop elegant solutions that solve multiple requests at once.

Customer feedback guides our product roadmap, which is not only public, but it also allows users to upvote features. We are constantly listening to our users and synthesizing what they’re reporting back. While this is how all good businesses should operate, we are especially proud of how well we can tackle multiple issues at the same time. Creativity, in addition to truly listening to our customers, is where the magic is.

As a small engineering team, we have a lot of agency and each member heavily contributes to the direction of our product. For example, Sean and Marc love that in some apps and websites you can use `cmd+k` to load up a search bar which allows you to quickly navigate around an app - the main example in mind being Slack’s “Jump to...” UI. We sat down and had a discussion about it as a team, Sean got to work, and within 2 weeks we had a fully functioning Quick Switcher deployed inside our Dash.

As an engineer at ReadMe, if you have a particular pain point with using the product, you can write a proposal and present it to the team. If we see the value, you can build it. Similarly, if you want to use a new technology, do some research and pitch it to the rest of the team. Examples: React, Next.js, Asana, Prettier, etc.

Most of our team came from the R&D division of IBM Watson, so we have a strong research-centric culture.

We look for individuals who thrive when given high-level guidelines and the freedom to operate independently within them. We encourage independent thought in our team members, and more importantly, we celebrate those who act on their independent thinking. We appreciate when people can make good decisions about how they allocate their time and prioritize which ideas to chase. While good ideas are valuable, we believe the majority of innovation comes from focus, and execution on, the right ideas.

Creativity and innovation are ingrained in the culture of EyeLevel.ai and in our teammates. As we grow, we look for independent-minded individuals who also know when to pull in others to collaborate and when to report back on their progress. Creativity is great, but true innovation requires collaboration.

We’re building a product that has never been built before.

We built the first ever visual CMS. We built the first visual Ecommerce. And we have so much more in our pipeline that will be the first of their kind. Software is helping the world, and we’re empowering professionals to build software visually. If AWS is making it easier for developers to scale their technology, Webflow makes it easier for developers to build frontends for their websites, apps, and businesses.

Imagine building a complex ecommerce website where you can have pixel perfect control of every part of the design experience, from browsing products to the checkout experience.

The idea for Webflow was born in 2012 when our co-founder and CTO Bryant was working at Vungle (a video advertising startup). His friends Sergie and Vlad (who are also brothers) were frustrated with the limitations that other tools like Wix or Squarespace had. Together, they imagined a better way to build websites, something as simple as the what-you-see-is-what-you-get (aka WYSIWG) CMS solutions, but as professional and fully-featured as Adobe's popular Dreamweaver.

Webflow is great for first-time business owners, freelancers, and reputable organizations like NASA, Dell, and MTV, who we are proud to count among our amazing customers!

We appreciate people who enjoy drifting from right brain to left brain and back again.

We believe our varied, windy-path backgrounds and personal creative projects will help us build a more human product. Some of our personal passion projects outside of the office include producing music, editing a novel, a daily art/composition practice, and DJ’ing large events.

We hope to emphasize to future team members that creativity is important to cultivate and embrace in both work and personal pursuits. It helps us widen our perspective not only around product development, but around company building, too.

We aren’t interested in hiring a team of Android or Windows developers to copy everything on our iOS app.

Everyone at GoodNotes has a say on the product and we only hire product-minded engineers. Going cross-platform is one of our biggest challenges, and creating a seamless experience for our users requires great ideas at the smallest scale.

We’ve built something that people love, and it’s not necessarily that we’re innovating at a macro level, but we’re devote creative efforts in all of the little things. Our focus on the details is really what makes our users love and enjoy our product. Our next goal is to make GoodNotes smarter and more accessible. We’ve done most of the digital features, but as the quality of devices improves and the number of devices an individual owns, there is so much room for innovation.

Now that we’ve built a strong foundation (see how we value High Quality Code Base above), we are perfectly positioned to accelerate growth. For example, syncing used to be an issue of ours, but it is no longer a problem with the way we now structure data. There are a lot of interesting things in the pipeline, and we can’t wait to execute and deliver them.

“Creating a culture of innovation” is a key company goal at Relay that directly impacts both the day to day and long term efforts of our engineering team.

We selectively leverage cutting edge technology as we are constantly on the lookout for new tools that can improve our product or development cycle. Additionally, we encourage active participation in Philadelphia tech community by hosting multiple Clojure meetups here in our office. We also have a product steering committee that sources and reviews ideas from anyone in the company on a weekly basis. What ultimately drives the sense of creativity and innovation at Relay is the fact that we’re building a completely new solution giving some of the world’s biggest companies a secure, personalized communication solution that simplifies and improves the customer experience for millions of people every day.

Facilitating human interactions in a scalable way is a very difficult problem, and requires creative and innovative solutions.

There are a lot of players in the dating space and also a lot of room for innovation in this domain. We have an organized, company-wide brainstorming session once every other month. We’ll count off by 4’s and form cross-functional thinking groups to tackle problems (ie. “driving revenue”) with focused topics for how to take that apart. Everyone at CMB has a sense of curiosity and we facilitate as much spontaneous collaboration as possible. We thrive on the individual and collective creativity of our team members, and breathe life into all ideas. (Remember Trump’s “Covfefe” tweet? Well, one of our QA’s office joke became a marketing concept and received more likes and comments than any other of our Instagram posts.) Our products wouldn’t exist without the creativity and innovation of our team's members.

We build the best solution possible by getting to the root of the problem.

When we experienced the pain point of tracking our cryptocurrency holdings, our first reaction was to investigate existing products. The results were not inspiring: hours of manual entry, batches of CSV uploads, and archaic interfaces built for accountants.

The original promise of bitcoin was as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that people could transact with. As they organically traded and transacted, would they want to regularly import CSVs from every exchange and wallet? We certainly didn't as users. What we really wanted was to have a product that would just work seamlessly.

So we crafted an elaborate get-rich-quick scheme, and devised the perfect ICO. We penciled together a five-year roadmap, got Vitalik and Satoshi as our advisors, and raised $50M for CoinTrackerCoin within two weeks!

Just kidding 😛

In three days, we put together a dashboard to immediately see your investment performance. Jon further iterated on the data import process to setup a seamless import of Coinbase transaction data and CoinTracker account creation in a single step — no manual entry or CSVs required, and it automatically synced all transactions on an ongoing basis. This was a step-function improvement on crypto portfolio tracking and users voted with their feet.

“If there are no shoes, be a cobbler.”

We're a small team solving a huge problem in the credit reporting world. We want to share credit across the world, and it requires a special combination of creativity to do it. As pioneers in our field, we highly value resourcefulness and often find ourselves challenging “conventional tracks” or ideas. When there isn’t an existing solution to a problem, we build one ourselves. We’re the first company to take on the task of moving credit data from around the world with seamless and consumer-friendly technology, so every integration we do means paving a new path.

Engineers at Nova have ample opportunities to put their ideas and creativity to work. There are always improvements to be made in our codebase and many in-house npm packages to publish. For example, James is spearheading our in-house UI library so that we can have more control over our front end design. Ian has been working on GraphQL-ing our API to make it simpler, and Zak wrote a mapping interpreter that will streamline our data mapping process for both engineers and non-technical folks.

We are always looking to hire new team members who can provide new perspectives, find contingencies in different approaches, and doggedly pursue answers to their questions.

Healthcare is an industry desperately in need of innovation.

There are some truly remarkable technological advancements in medicine. We can somehow use DNA sequencing and bioinformatics to analyze the function and structure of entire genomes but we still can’t seem to send you your medical records from your previous doctor without faxing you your documents page by page. To solve this problem, we are leveraging machine learning to help patients and their families manage their medical records and recently won Google Cloud’s Machine Learning Startup Competition. To date, we have collected and structured 500,000 records from 5,000 different health care facilities.

Prototyping is an invaluable part of our creative and engineering processes.

We’re not afraid to spend time exploring ideas that may not pan out, because we know that every idea that doesn’t make it to production is a learning opportunity that informs our future decisions. For example, on the Mobile team, we try out different designs for the app and test out experimental features to see what people think. Or when building software, we might spend a day or two exploring a new idea or technique but end up going a different route.

It’s also important that team members exercise their creativity in troubleshooting issues. We have to get very creative to solve problems quickly for our Partners, since their ability to get production back up and running often relies on our team jumping into action and coming up with smart fixes. Like most startups, we identify as being small, scrappy, and agile. While our resources are limited, we never allow that to be an excuse for un-scalable work.

We’re able to stay nimble and innovative since our Hardware Engineering team has many resources for prototyping at all different levels of fidelity. We can get 3D prints within one day, machine parts in 3-5 days, and soft-tooling within 2 weeks. While our product development process is similar to other consumer electronics companies, we have a few additional layers to consider. For instance, most consumer electronics need sealing to keep liquid out - we need to design for sealing a liquid in (i.e. different types of cannabis oil). This is an example of a unique challenge we get to work on at PAX.

We are constantly experimenting and thinking about how to scale YC.

The software team is continually collecting feedback from YC founders, partners, and employees. A big part of our job is figuring out how to scale YC, improve the founder experience, increase the number of startup applications, and better support our alumni community. Once a month, the software team meets for a few hours to brainstorm about which projects will bring the most value and drive our organization’s key metrics. New initiatives are born from these meetings, like building our public recommendation software, which encourages people to apply to YC. We are always looking for new ways to get the word out about YC and encourage people who might not otherwise start a company or apply to do just that.

We are a product that serves the creative community, and the best fit engineer would be a creative himself/herself.

Whether it’s photography, dancing, or music, we hope you have a passion pursuit of your own that allows you to relate to the mind of our end users.

We’re a creative bunch ourselves: one of our founders used to be the lead singer in a band in high school, another team member was a part-time wedding photographer. We also have a stand-up comedian on the team who performs all over the Bay Area. Whatever your creative outlet is, we’re happy you have one.

We focus on our customers and their problems, not the solutions themselves.

We are building a team of people who have diverse backgrounds and have experience solving a wide variety of problems. Ultimately, their creativity around problem solving is derived from a passion for understanding the customer’s problem, not so much by the actual solution they can apply. Coupling diverse experiences with a strong understanding of the problem, we often come up with creative and innovative solutions to test. We look for people who have both a tendency to think creatively and a strong passion toward our mission and our customers’ problems.

We absolutely encourage all of our team members to have creative outlets within and outside of Coast. People have side projects that they foster and in some cases these directly aid Coast’s mission. To test high-impact ideas, we often hold internal hackathons. These projects are almost immediately followed by direct demos with customers to evaluate their efficacy.

We try to be creative when it comes to finding technical solutions to our clients’ problems.

We enjoy figuring out how to implement a good UI so that the client is able to work as efficiently as possible, and deciding which technologies to combine and how to do so. For the last 8 years, we have developed (and still maintain) a product database for the automotive branch of Bosch. The application is used worldwide by 20K users on a daily basis, which makes it one of the top 5 most used applications within Bosch. The heart of the application is a pretty complex workflow management process that is also hooked in a few other applications of Bosch, which made the whole project quite challenging. We love facing complex problems and pushing ourselves to develop creative solutions.

You won’t be pigeonholed in any way.

The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry is ancient and in desperate need of help. Right now, making architecture is a highly complicated process that involves hundreds or thousands of Excel spreadsheets. It’s shockingly manual. Our Monograph Dashboard combines all of the typical Excel spreadsheets into one integrated and simple interface. We know this can sound pretty boring, but this is why we pull so much inspiration from Stripe and Gusto: payments and payroll are two equally unsexy processes, but they are necessary and can now be done pleasantly. We use a lot of our creative juices to make Monograph an equally wonderful experience for our users.

We also consider ourselves to be creative and innovative in how we approach the rest of our business. As a small team, we default to using hacks. For instance, we make sure people always know what we’re doing, and as a result, we get feedback, make unexpected hires, and find sponsors organically.

Our culture is not a dictation of a solution, but rather engineers working together with stakeholders to build a solution.

Creativity is a huge plus in terms of what we seek in a potential hire because, while we have the freedom to implement in the way we want, that only matters if we come up with something that improves on the existing paradigm. We need to produce enterprise-grade quality software while finding innovative solutions to get there. When we look to hire new team members, we ask: How can they contribute to the team and introduce something (solution or experience) we don't currently have?

Engineers at Billtrust have many creative outlets. Devs can write tools that we use in our pipeline and are encouraged to update open source software to suit our needs. We don't think you need a personal project to fit in, but you need to be able to be willing to solve a lot of problems with code. We’ve had proofs of concept transform into products, and have incorporated hackathon projects into our core workflows. Engineers have ample opportunities to create a solution that becomes part of our general practice or product suite so long as it benefits our customers or internal teams.

At Connected, our engineers work closely with our designers to create a truly innovative product.

We announce the latest tech news during morning stand up, exchange knowledge on Slack, and conduct regular Lunch and Learns in order to teach, learn, and improve. Collectively curious, our engineers work closely with our designers and product strategists to build groundbreaking products. Our team is extremely passionate about new technology and is always on the hunt for the next new thing.

Diversity is extremely important to us and we encourage engineers of all backgrounds and personalities to apply. We especially value teachers and learners who are smart, kind, and reliable.

Software development as we know it isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it’s only going to get bigger and crazier.

The possibilities truly are endless.

What “product” is at GitHub has changed so much since the company first started, and it will continue to change and evolve in coming months and years. If you are an engineer who wants to build stuff for growth, we are well positioned to give you the environment you need. Software development is expanding exponentially, so we have created space for ourselves to build new things that we haven’t even considered the possibility of yet. There’s so much opportunity, so much to look forward to, and we expect many of you reading this to help us be pioneers. Check out our full list of jobs here.

For more reading, check out our technology predictions for 2018, read other posts on our blog, and look at some of GitHub’s 2017 highlights in our 2017 State of the Octobers.