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.

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 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.

We bring cutting-edge AI research and world-class engineering into the real world.

Since the first industrial robots were introduced in the 1960s, millions have been deployed globally. Their impact is undeniable. Robots have automated countless dangerous, repetitive tasks, transforming manufacturing, but they've only reached a fraction of their potential. Incapable of thinking on their own, they can only do pre-programmed tasks in tightly-controlled environments. They can't understand, learn, or adapt. Covariant was founded in 2017 to change this.

Building on our experience at Berkeley and OpenAI, our vision is the Covariant Brain: universal AI that allows robots to see, reason, and act on the world around them. We’re bringing the Covariant Brain to commercial viability, starting with the industries that make, move, and store things in the physical world.

Our approach is rooted in the following principles:

1. General robotic intelligence. Instead of learning to master specific tasks separately, Covariant robots learn general abilities such as robust 3D perception, physical affordances of objects, few-shot learning, and real-time motion planning. This allows them to adapt to new tasks just like people do – by breaking down complex tasks into simple steps and applying general skills to complete them.
2. Research meets industry. Bringing practical AI Robotics into the physical world is hard. It involves giving robots a level of autonomy that requires breakthroughs in AI research. That’s why we have assembled a team that has published cutting-edge research papers at the top AI conferences and journals, with more than 50,000 collective citations. In addition to our research, we’ve also brought together a world-class engineering team to create new types of highly robust, reliable, and performant cyber-physical systems.
3. Perfecting each component. We’re only as strong as our weakest link. If one component lags, the whole system fails. That’s why we’ve built a full-stack team, investing in making each robotic component world-class, from software systems to hardware stations, from AI algorithms to end-effectors.

We often solve problems that others haven’t solved before and need to come up with 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 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 but 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 is being able to constantly dog food our own product, too! As developers ourselves, we are our own users and get immediate feedback as we build.

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 pride ourselves on being able to develop elegant solutions that solve our customer's problems.

We take customer feedback so seriously that we share our product roadmap w/ our users and the greater public – we've done so for years. Not only is our roadmap public, but it also allows users to upvote features! User feedback guides how we plan and develop our product, and ensures that we always have a direct line of communication w/ our end users. 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.

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.

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 a patent for this technology, that is 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 e-comm platform, review system for products and discovery, interactive maps for products in your area, and more.

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 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, 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.

“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.

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.

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. Monograph 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.

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.

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.

We’re creating an entirely new category for communities.

If the year 2020 has 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. With Orbit, you can use our API to automatically understand which developers are most active in your community.

While our company’s approach is innovative in itself, we also foster creativity internally. We not only provide creative outlets such as writing, giving talks, and side projects, but we actively encourage everyone to stretch themselves and take full advantage of opportunities that speak to them. That’s why we prioritize giving our team enough uninterrupted time to be creative and believe meetings should come second to flow time.

As one of many examples, everyone at Orbit contributes to our blog. 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!

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.