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 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.

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 believe that creativity is one of the most important traits you can have when solving difficult problems.

To us, creativity comes in many different forms, including:

• Technical creativity. Many of the engineering and product design questions we face have no clear or easily accessible answers, so it's imperative to be able to combine technical expertise and mental flexibility in order to work in this space.
• Play-making ability. To borrow a sports term, we look for individuals who think beyond their day-to-day responsibilities and are able to create their own opportunities to further both the organization and their own careers. We don't micromanage. We expect individuals to control their own outcomes.
• Unconventional thinking. Beyond the typical engineering and product projects, we try to think outside of the box for all the problems we encounter as a small startup. For example, in order to get more high-quality feedback from external users, we started a rotation program in which small engineering teams could use our office space and amenities for free in exchange for using our product and sharing their real-world experiences.

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’re going into an industry that has resisted using software tools and setting the bar for what construction technology should look and feel like.

The construction of the new Warriors Stadium in Mission Bay requires a thousand different companies to come together. Imagine coordinating and managing that type of project on email! Luckily, they no longer have to. Our platform allows general contractors (GCs) and subcontractors to find and share documents securely, provides analytics, and eliminates the need for people to manually update a contact database. BuildingConnected is defining what these tools should look like and how building owners, GCs, and subcontractors will use them.

We also consider ourselves to be innovative in how we run our company. There is a playbook for starting companies in Silicon Valley and we refuse to adhere to them. For example, the accepted model for customer support is to use email, farm it out, and scale scale scale. We are thoughtful in how we grow our business based on our particular industry and as a result, are constantly innovating ways to manage, grow, and structure our company.

“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.

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.

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 often solve problems that others haven’t solved before and need to come up with creative solutions that use our unique skill set.

Banking is something most people take for granted. Even business people think they know how it works. How hard could it be to integrate with bank software? It’s easy to open a checking account online, we can connect it to Mint... All that stuff is connected, right? Unfortunately, no.

In fact, banks and their customers in the US are often woefully behind, stuck using the first generation of web-enabled technology from 30 years ago.

We are attacking a problem that no one has tackled before, and we have a vision that is hard for some people to grasp. We’re not starting with a blank sheet of paper, it’s more like 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.

And we can’t do it alone. We need to help our customers have that vision too, in order to give us the access and information we need. We are challenged to innovate, share that nascent vision, create the solution, and then do it again.

Braze humanizes brands.

The hard problem of personalized engagement across hundreds of millions of users can only be solved through creative, innovative solutions. Our product orchestrates rich analytics, segmentation (creating actionable subsets of users), and engagement (across multiple platforms, e.g. push, in-app messages, email, webhooks) to deliver experiences to hundreds of millions of users.

In the past year, our platform has been used to send welcome messaging based off of geofence boundary crossing, rich push notifications delivering real time election notifications, and personalized music recommendations delivered through in-app messages.

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.

Time is our most valuable commodity, so we have to be creative.

We value velocity and invest in tools that help you accomplish more in less time. We encourage folks at Armory to solve things in creative ways and to hack systems in order to get to the end result as quickly as possible. When validating an idea we do so with the least amount of engineering resources possible. We are not afraid to throw away code and always ensure that we are building the right things fast instead of the wrong things right.

All of our engineers are encouraged to work on projects and features that interest them, and everyone here has the freedom to take on additional work if they want to. For example, one of our engineers took on a project to create a flipdot display for our office. He coded the software needed for it and built the panels. Working at a start-up exposes you to many different projects and aspects of the business, there’s always something to learn!

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 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 product appears simple, but it supports complex processes through innovative interfaces.

Many of the problems our product solves for our clients involve complex real-world processes. For example, our clients receive their inventory from a distributor, and they must track it in real time through various physical spaces and whom it is sold to. We have been able to accomplish this through great, innovative design and engineering from our team. Our clients have told us repeatedly how simple our product is to use and how much better it has been for them since implementation.

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.