Engineering teams that value creativity and innovation

We’re building the first-ever developer-led platform for collaborating on and seamlessly validating hardware designs.

The world around us is enabled by novel circuit designs. Consider the seemingly trivial act of hailing a taxi from the comfort of your home. This simple process (for you) relies on a 3 million light-emitting diode display with a user interface that is logically routed to a capacitive sensor capable of tracking your finger at sub-millimeter resolution, an antenna capable of transmitting to a radio tower kilometers away at a rate of 20 Gb/s, repeated 35,000km to a satellite, which is able to use its own integrated sensors and drivers to maintain geosynchronous orbit over decades, without human interference.

The infrastructure we've taken for granted wasn't designed overnight and isn't staying put. However, the hardware industry is stuck relying on PDFs, email, and in-person meetings at each design review in order to get things done. Our co-founders, Kyle and Valentina, experienced these pain points firsthand and got to talking about them while doing a joint engineering master’s and MBA at Harvard. We believe the next progression of human innovation, like putting the first human colonies on Mars, requires a step-change in how hardware designs are managed. Enter AllSpice! Our platform is compatible with tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, and allows hardware teams to control revisions, reviews, and releases all from one place – enabling a truly agile workflow.

Thinking about how to take the best practices that have evolved in software development and apply them to hardware engineering is complex and rarely straightforward. It requires a collaborative approach and thinking outside of the box. Our diff tool is a great example since we have to think about how to communicate schematics information in a visual way. Similarly, there are other differences in the hardware space that require a more technical approach, whether it’s digging into file formats or figuring out how to merge binary design data.

These are exciting challenges to work on and since we’re the first to delve into this space, many of our customers look to us for guidance. For instance, they’ll ask us, “What should we be doing for releases?” and we get to brainstorm, ideate, and iterate on the best solutions. From larger issues such as helping customers manage the chip shortage, to more nitty-gritty decisions like deciding where to place a certain button, we keep feedback loops tight (often hopping on customer calls) and are always looking for creative ways to improve our users’ experience. Check out this blog post to learn more about how our customers love using our product.

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’re transforming the way truckers and fuel stops operate.

Traditionally, truckers would need to pay for diesel with fuel cards or credit cards. Not only do these come with a slew of extra fees, but they can also take time for applications and credit checks to be processed and exclude mom and pop fuel stops. By leveraging technology to take the hassle out of this experience, we’re completely reinventing the business and are at the forefront of a major technical overhaul of the trucking space. We charge zero fees and save drivers on average 40 cents per gallon, while connecting them with smaller owner-operators who can simultaneously grow their businesses.

As we expand, we’re looking at innovative ways to evolve into a platform that not only sells gas, but also offers a broader e-commerce platform for the trucking industry. Our goal is to create a new, digital wallet for truckers that goes beyond fuel, adding services such as repairs, maintenance, and insurance. What’s more, we recognize that electric vehicles will continue to transform the space and we’re well-positioned to stay ahead of the curve there, too.

Our engineers strike a balance between creating thoughtful updates and working quickly to make our product the best it can be. The team believes in data and running experiments, but we are also eager to make fast changes. We are not married to past practices and are always open to changing our approach and technical architecture to keep improving. For example, Vite/Vue3 was introduced as a separate frontend repo for a project. After the initial churn of figuring out how to approach the frontend, a new frontend team formed and began to write code quickly and refactor aggressively when newer patterns or tech was introduced.

Overall, we take full advantage of the diverse expertise of people from both inside and outside the industry. Our engineers combine their own technology with open-source platforms including Sidekiq, Redis, Postgres, and Metabase, to make sure we are always innovating. If you’re a curious thinker who wants to keep learning, definitely reach out!

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’re transforming how people understand the world of manufacturing.

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 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 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 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.

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.

We’re completely transforming the insurance space.

Traditionally, applying for life insurance is a tedious task that involves too much in-person paperwork and time-consuming meetings with “salesy” agents. We knew there had to be a better way. Our digital user experience and real-time underwriting system is the first of its kind and reduces the months-long process of applying for life insurance to just minutes. What’s more, since life changes are fluid (think: you’ve paid down your mortgage, your kids are older than 18), we’re able to be flexible as well; our platform offers the ability to “ladder up or down” and add or remove coverage as needed. Additionally, we’re partnering with online-only banks like SoFi and Ally to serve a broader set of consumers and help close coverage gaps.

While we have quarterly goals, we eschew a strict deadline-driven culture. Outside of the day-to-day work we do during sprints, engineers have roughly 10-20% of their time to dedicate to other projects and ideas. We recently had our first hackathon (which we hope to continue 1-2 times per year) and look forward to having some of these ideas make it live into production!

Reimagining what’s possible is true of both our culture and our product.

When it comes to making employee leave an easier, more transparent process, we practice what we preach. Leading by example, we’ve introduced compassionate leave – a comprehensive paid leave policy that accounts for less typical reasons employees may need time off beyond those covered by existing laws and policies. Regardless of tenure, all part- and full-time team members are given the flexibility and trust to take the time they need without disclosing the reason to HR (something that often prevents people from taking leave in sensitive situations like pregnancy loss or mental health). Since we believe millions of workers should have access to compassionate paid leave, we also open-sourced our policy language (vetted by our compliance lawyers) so that other companies can adopt similar policies.

Everyone is a creator and embraces challenges with a “how might we” mindset to leave things better than we found them. We’ll never be satisfied with the status quo and are constantly innovating to improve the employee leave experience. For instance, pay is often a huge stressor for people taking leave since it’s common to see income from several different sources (e.g. employer, disability insurance, and a state program) on an irregular schedule. To solve for this, we created a pay tracker dashboard, so folks can easily see how much they’re getting paid, when, and from which sources.

Our annual hack week only underscored this passion to push boundaries and truly transform employee leave. Whether it was something small like turning a plain-text email into a beautifully-designed template (which is now live in production) or bigger, like thinking about how companies can preview policies before even signing up for Cocoon, we came up with countless creative ways to improve the product. Since good ideas can come from anywhere, we also have a “What if?” Slack channel where anyone in the company can share an idea – and sometimes engineers can even ship it that same day!

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.

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.