Engineering teams that value creativity and innovation

Creativity is not just reserved for designers at Upstatement.

Engineering is an inherently creative discipline and our knowledge of technology informs how projects take shape. That’s why it’s so important that engineers at Upstatement are involved starting at the earliest project phases. Engineers don’t just await orders from designers; we’re actively brainstorming alongside them, pointing out opportunities and risks, and proposing creative solutions. For any given project you might find yourself leading an interview with a technology stakeholder, facilitating an architecture activity during a workshop, or persuading a client why a particular tech stack meets their needs during a creative brief share.

We often solve problems that others haven’t solved before and seek out creative solutions that use our unique skill set.

Banking can be a very dry subject, with many arcane corners, but doing it right is a powerful lever for change. We’re talking about modernizing 19% of the entire U.S. economy and that should excite you!

Banks and their customers in the U.S. are often woefully behind, stuck using the first-generation technology from 30 years ago. None of these systems are connected, but we're trying to create a unified platform that can enable any fintech, as well as the bank itself, to build on top of it.

We’re not starting with a blank sheet of paper; instead, we’re starting with a tangle of multiple long pieces of yarn and trying to make a sweater. It takes some creativity (and bravery) to see the tangle, envision the sweater, and dive in to make it happen.

If you love (or can learn to love) building a product that empowers developers and banks to build new products, then we'd love to hear from you!

We’re leveraging automation and robotics to help us scale.

By focusing on bringing critical services (like vaccinations and simple diagnostic tests) to users directly (at offices, schools, or even at home), we can transform the way public health happens and make it much more convenient. In order to do that successfully, we place a large emphasis on both engineering and design innovation in everything from physical specimen collection kits to detailed genetics reports. Our products are also expanding into other healthcare domains such as mental health support and sexually transmitted disease programs.

We’re transforming how people understand the manufactured world.

At Lumafield, we’re creating imaging technology in the form of hardware and software systems. Our revolutionary machine and entirely new cloud-based SAAS platform allows a wide range of objects – including everything from sneakers to car parts to foods – to be scanned. From there, customers can use the platform to measure parts and assemblies, and to run powerful analyses of defects and other features of the scanned part. Designing a web-based visualization and analysis tool is a highly visual process and there are no cut and dry answers for how we approach it. For instance, we use certain libraries to build various features and we also implement algorithms from research papers. There’s no rulebook for what we’re building, which is why we look for engineers who are excited about getting creative and thinking outside the box.

We place an extreme focus on the developer.

Most companies who’ve attempted to solve secrets management before built it for the devops and security teams. These tools tend to be overly cumbersome to use and require constant maintenance. We decided to take a different path by building Doppler for developers and placing an emphasis on the user experience. Typically the more secure you build something, the worse the experience is. Working at the intersection of developer productivity and security means you have to get creative. For example, our command line tool login flow begins with a simple command that takes you to the browser so you can authenticate like you would any other website. From a user experience perspective, the user just logged into a site while behind the scenes we created a new token for that user, scoped to their machine, and placed it securely in the keyring on their computer. This is just one example of how getting creative can lead to a better experience that is also more secure.

Another big advantage of being built by developers for developers is being able to dog food our own product! As developers, we are our own users and get immediate feedback as we build.

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’ve been referred to as the Amazon of online weed shopping, but really we’re so much more. It might be more accurate to say we’re an Amazon-like experience, because on the backend we source from and support local businesses. We are transforming local brick-and-mortar stores into an online localized marketplace by directly integrating into the stores’ Point-Of-Sale systems, something that isn’t currently being done. We also have five software utility patents for this technology that are not specific to cannabis.

While we have great product-market fit, given our unique positioning, our backend problems surrounding infrastructure and scalability are very interesting. We’re building an off-the-shelf e-commerce platform, a review system for products and discovery, and recently launched an advertising product that allows cannabis brands to target cannabis consumers. One great example of innovation at Jane: ownership tags. We made it easy for customers to be able to shop according to their values and find dispensaries owned by underrepresented groups whether that’s BIPOC-, LGBTQ-, Women- and Veteran-owned stores, to name a few.

Cannabis discovery is more similar to finding music you like than wine. Some people may listen to house music and feel super focused, while others get revved up. With cannabis, how you experience things is unique to the individual. We’re using data to figure out how someone with your specific tastes and preferences for certain strains and products can be matched with others who share similar profiles. That way, if we know these strains worked for others like you, we can help you find new products you might enjoy, too.

We believe that software engineering is a creative process.

While our key metrics are vital in how we manage our business, sometimes the right solution can't be achieved just by optimizing metrics. We take risks and don't let setbacks derail our pursuit of innovation. We learn from our customers, iterate early and often and learn from our mistakes. Having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together enables us to create innovative products that improve the way people live and communicate. Learn more about what we’re working on in our engineering blog.

We have dedicated time for engineers to think outside of the box.

Our engineering team works in a six-week cycle, followed by a two-week cool-down period. During these two weeks, engineers take the time to catch up, collaborate together, make improvements to the code or processes, and innovate on any idea or project they choose.

We also have regular hackathons every few cycles! Several great ideas are now live in production, thanks to these projects. For instance, our users shared with our customer success team that a central pain point was not knowing which items at the grocery store were eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. They would have to take an item to the checkout counter and ring it up. Katie spearheaded a project to allow users to scan barcodes to see right away if an item was eligible for SNAP.

Another valuable addition to our app came from Ilya. His idea was to show if a deposit is pending, so that users could have more information about their overall balance. 🙌

We’re completely transforming financial health and access to payment cards that people can trust.

Our digital app and debit cards offer an entirely new way for people to gain the cashback and subscription rewards that are traditionally only available with credit cards. Our customers can earn the most rewards on subscriptions they actually use such as Netflix, Spotify, and Instacart. We offer all of the protection associated with a typical credit card, but without any of the debt risk. This also means a broader and more diverse population can access our cards.

Thanks to our team’s fast-paced environment, if we have an idea, it’s something we can pursue more or less immediately. This potential for agility promotes creative thinking, which of course, leads to innovation. We look for engineers who are keen on adopting this mindset. They’re interested in pursuing goals and projects that require creative solutions. What’s more, we’re big on dogfooding our own product and making sure all of our team members’ ideas are taken into account. Since feedback is so important to us, we even created a specific engineering role that is product growth oriented to help us continue to build the best product possible.

We’re fundamentally changing the way people interact with video.

Traditionally, the video editing process is cumbersome and involves awkward and time consuming processes like paper edits created from time-stamped transcripts, which are in effect workarounds and hacks. In fact, most non-video professionals such as researchers and marketers – who often generate a lot of video for their work – end up not using it because it’s too time consuming. Prabhas (co-founder and CEO) experienced this first-hand when he was doing design research at the Stanford Design Program. After recording hours of in-depth user interviews, he found it challenging to communicate the insights and stories to a wider audience. He knew there had to be an easier way to make video editing as simple as editing text. Meanwhile, Rob (co-founder and CTO) was working in an Alan Kay-led lab to imagine the future of computing where he was developing Gentle. The two former high school friends reconnected and thus Reduct was born.

Many of our users record hundreds of hours of conversations every month, but had no way to access the information in them without slowly rewatching. Being able to search within their archives is genuinely transformative to how they think and work. Because our product feels a little more like Google Docs than Final Cut, everyone is able to combine the clips they find into a shareable reel, even if they’re not so tech savvy.

We deliver personalized learning experiences to help communities of any size.

As a high school math teacher, Mike (co-founder and Chief Education Officer) saw firsthand how important peer-to-peer learning is in the classroom. This led him to brainstorm what 1:1 coaching could look like in the workplace for both smaller startups and Fortune 500 companies. He teamed up with Ben (co-founder and CEO) and Wei (co-founder and CTO/COO) to found Upduo, with the mission of transforming the educational landscape through live peer-to-peer coaching at scale. Today, over 15,000 conversations happen every week on Upduo and our live 1:1 interactions help with everything from scaling companies’ sales trainings to streamlining onboarding processes and improving diversity and inclusion.

It’s fair to say we’re comfortable with ambiguity and open to change when it makes sense. In fact, we changed our core user flow three times in response to new learnings, without falling for the sunk cost fallacy. We also migrated our entire frontend to React with Hooks and TypeScript in just one month. We constantly ask ourselves, “Are we coming up with the best solution we can, or are we simply taking cues from ‘best practices’?” If the answer happens to be the latter, then we give it extra attention. In practice, this means we give engineers high-level problem statements but empower them with the freedom to explore and implement their own solutions. Of course, you’ll always have the full support of everyone on the team if you bump into any roadblocks or just need a sounding board.

The very idea of a data co-op is groundbreaking.

That means there’s lots of exciting questions to answer such as:

• Can the users generating data take direct control over it, share it with others, and leverage it in ways that give them immediate, individual benefit?
• Can we change the direction of an entire industry by taking control of the data pipeline?
• Can a tech startup be cooperatively owned by its users and still scale?

While we have deep experience in the space (we’ve worked in technology, public policy, and as community organizers), it’s not a requirement for joining our team. Rather, we seek to hire people who are excited about trying new things and thinking outside the box. For instance, this might be using Elixir to approach large scale data in new ways or coming up with novel methods for soliciting user input in design and development.

There's no one right way to approach what we’re building, but it’s safe to say we’re all bonded by the drive to find creative and new ways of applying startup methodology to social challenges. As a new engineer who joins the team, you’ll have an outsized impact in helping us determine how our architecture and tech stack evolves.

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.

Unlike legacy incumbents, what we’re building is truly cutting-edge.

We’re transforming the future of satellite vehicle communications, working to replace manual or email-driven systems in order to maneuver satellites in real-time. In turn, we’re decreasing the costs of operating satellites by orders of magnitude. In some cases, we’re even replacing a piece of software that was built on DOS 3.1, which was out of date a quarter century ago. Currently, if you want to fly a satellite, you need to spend a few billion dollars building your own comms infrastructure, or you have to go to a legacy antenna network provider, which also presents its own challenges since their technology is old and hard to work with. We’re pioneering the communication infrastructure for U.S. government satellites by leveraging modern technologies that provide a more secure, automated, and user-centric experience.

The amount of activity in space has exploded in recent years, and the ground support infrastructure has struggled to keep up. Sphinx is capitalizing on this market growth by modernizing space to ground communications, both driving down the costs of operating satellites and unlocking new capabilities. Our customers include the U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Navy, who are helping us develop our platform. As the commercial market continues to grow and mature, our space communications platform will have important commercial applications.

Every engineer at LaunchDarkly has personally felt the pain of shipping and breaking something in production. We’re here to help.

Feature management is critically important to every software company, and every company that is in the process of becoming a software company. We proudly serve customers like Square, Atlassian, Intuit, IBM, and NBC (to name a few), and know how valuable it is to have a safety net when releasing new changes of all types. Rapid, easy, risk-free deployment is transformative for software teams. We love being able to empower development teams to collaborate more effectively, maintain stability, and deliver software faster.

We serve trillions of feature flags daily for companies big and small. Developers and operations teams use LaunchDarkly to eliminate risk from their software development cycles, and we (of course) use our own product to uneventfully ship code many times a day.

We won’t stop until every software team on the planet is using feature management to deploy with confidence.

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 of disconnected spreadsheets. It’s shockingly manual. Monograph combines all of the typical spreadsheets into one integrated and simple interface. We know this can sound mundane, but this is why we pull so much inspiration from Stripe and Gusto: payments and payroll are two equally tedious processes, but they are necessary and can now be done pleasantly. We use a lot of our creative energy 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 growing 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.

We’re creating an entirely new category for communities.

If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that humans have an inherent need to connect with others and belong, and we’re completely reinventing how that’s done. Our Orbit Model is a bold attempt to provide a framework that helps anyone build better communities, whether that’s an open source maintainer looking for contributors, a meetup organizer searching for speakers, or a large company that relies on their community for product feedback and getting the word out. Every company and product has a community, but they’re not always leveraging and serving that community in the best way possible. Our Co-Founder and CEO, Patrick, shares our thinking about community regularly (recent examples: a16z Future and Inc. Magazine) and we see lots of signs that the world is embracing our approach.

While our company’s approach is innovative in itself, we also foster creativity internally. We provide creative outlets such as writing, giving talks, and side projects as well as actively encouraging everyone to stretch themselves and take full advantage of opportunities that speak to them. We have a popular book club. We invest in internal tools and programs to make our work better and more fulfilling. We prioritize flow time and use meetings intelligently for topics that lend themselves best to synchronous conversation. For everything else, we move it async.

One of our favorite shared creative outlets is our blog. Everyone at Orbit can contribute something and many of them do . We love to have fun and some of our best ideas come from joking around. In fact, one of our most popular blog posts was an April Fools’ Day post!

If you’re looking to read about what it’s like to join Orbit, read this post from our now-engineering manager Ulrich Sossou: From Cybercafe to Rocketship: My First Month at Orbit.