Teams do it better.

Whenever we bring someone new onto our team, we rethink our seating plan. We want people to sit alongside the group they’ll be working with most. For the most part, product, engineering, sales, and customer success sit with others in their department, but while you might be sitting with other engineers, you may also be sitting across from a designer. We do this to facilitate easy communication and collaboration and encourage engineers to be involved at all stages of the development cycle.

As an engineer, you’ll work closely with folks from every other department. We are all about team players and we are careful not to hire anyone who prefers working in a silo by themselves. We said it before and we’ll say it again: teams do it better.

Delivering best-in-class care is naturally a collaborative endeavor.

Curai’s core product is a virtual primary care clinic. Our engineering team builds the iOS, Android, and web applications that our patients use, as well as the web client and electronic health record (EHR) system that our clinical team uses to provide care. By nature, the work needed to deliver best-in-class care for our patients is cross-functional and collaborative.

A great example of this is the team working on building our EHR. Jen Jen Chen is a data scientist, a pediatric pulmonologist, a competitive gamer, and she serves as the product manager defining the long-term vision for our EHR. She works alongside designers, clinical operations team members, and engineers to bring the vision to life.

Mahnoor Shafi is one of the lead engineers focused on building our EHR. She considered going to medical school before deciding to become an engineer. When asked why she joined Curai, she wrote, “I wanted to join a small company where I would work on a complex problem, learn at a fast pace, and have a large impact. Having just spent a year working in an emergency room, I was drawn to Curai because they were working on issues I had seen firsthand at the hospital and wanted to help solve.” Since joining, Mahnoor has orchestrated numerous pieces of our EHR, and currently leads the charge maintaining our prescription and lab order infrastructure in collaboration with EHR-focused teammates.

As an engineer at Newfront, you'll work with world-class engineers from places like Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Palantir who are eager to help and share their expertise. But you'll interact with members of other teams every day who directly impact the product we’re building.

To steer your work, you'll collaborate with deeply experienced insurance specialists (both brokers and account managers) who guide the direction of two major products: our client dashboard and account management platform. We think it's critical for our team to understand the human needs behind a product in order to engineer the best solutions.

In addition to ideation and feedback on our software, we share learnings with both technical and non-technical team members – including Newfront’s operational team in growth and marketing – to ensure our products are continuously improving and that as many people as possible get to use our work.

As a distributed company, we foster social interaction across departments through company-wide events and with the Donut app for Slack, which pairs teammates who don't usually work together to set up a virtual coffee or donut break. It’s optional, but a great way to get to know your teammates in a less formal setting. We’re also active on Slack and Zoom so everyone can stay in the loop.

We value cross-functional teams that bring together key stakeholders from across the company to accomplish a shared goal.

Not only does working collaboratively allow us to build connections, but it also strengthens our understanding of our users. Product Managers and Engineers get to work with stakeholders in legal, operations, finance, sales, etc., to help design and build systems serving their individual needs. Whether this is building better compliance and auditing tools for legal, better sales forecasting frameworks for the sales team, or more efficient processes for our operation teams, everyone benefits. The amount of collaboration depends on the team. You don’t have to work directly with stakeholders all the time, but it is a big part of our culture!

Our collaborative culture is part of what makes Stitch Fix unique.

In addition to building software used by Stitch Fix customers, we build many internal tools used by Stitch Fix employees. Most engineers here work directly with the people using the software they write. Engineers work together with non-technical people in other departments to solve business problems. That means the engineers supporting Merchandising work directly with buyers and planners to build the tools Merchandising needs to do their jobs. Engineers supporting Operations work directly with teams in the warehouse. We place a high value on partnership here. It's how we work everyday, and how we build great things together.

At Hatch, we regularly cross most of the typical departmental boundaries.

Engineers at Hatch will work with Marketing, Sales, BD, Legal, Finance, Credit, Operations, and Customer Service. In 2013, WhatsApp moved billions of messages a day between 200 million daily active users with a team of just 50 people. Our goal is to build and scale Hatch with the same power-to-weight ratio. A small but mighty team has the ability to keep communication overhead low and better adapt to changing customer needs, but it requires a lot of collaboration. Everyone at Hatch works together, blurring most of the typical departmental boundaries. As for software engineers, we strongly believe the purpose of writing software is to provide a product in service of someone else, whether it’s our small business owners or fellow team members.

Two heads are always better than one.

People who thrive at Qualia are inquisitive, customer-focused, and – most important – collaborative. Company-wide, we seek out opportunities to share knowledge and combine efforts. Our engineers work closely with team members in all parts of the organization (particularly with Product and Design), ensuring stronger cohesion across teams and a greater overall understanding of our customers’ needs. We believe the best ideas can come from anyone, and everyone at Qualia is encouraged to ask questions, join discussions, and speak their mind.

We’re all working toward the same goal – to transform home buying and selling into a quick, simple, and secure experience. Being a cross-functional, team-focused organization is critical to our success.

We have a strict pro-team rule.

Our product team is one that strives to strip away assumptions and biases, because none of us are care recipients or Care Professionals. Home care is crazy complex… a complicated, nuanced, emotional, messy, dirty set of technical and operational challenges. It’s unintuitive. We are constantly re-evaluating a lot of fundamental product-building assumptions because our industry is so unique. We believe in high-bandwidth communication, lots of collaboration, and ownership.

We have a lot of different pieces in play.

We have an interface for our users that allows them to sign up, tell us who their doctors are, and where they can interact and share their records once we collect them. (Check out our demo!) However, the majority of our work is in structuring the data from the records we receive. We have an extensive internal system for managing the medical record collection process (think calling offices and getting faxes) as well as an interface for processing. We get paper records that need to be transformed into text, and from there, into structured data where individual data elements are recognized. Thus, each of us works closely with our operations and sales teams.

It’s a fundamental fact that robotics is interdisciplinary.

We have a flat structure at Covariant, so we don't have rigid departmental divides. Everything we do is cross-functional because real progress in robotics requires tight integration of hardware, software, research, and business. For example, as Carlos Florensa (a PhD candidate) explained, “My research background hadn’t trained me to efficiently contribute to a constantly-changing codebase – I used to be the only person modifying my code! Thanks to the extremely collaborative nature of Covariant, and the patience and eagerness to help from colleagues like Jasmine Deng and co-founder Rocky Duan, I could ramp up these skills faster than anywhere else!”

At Covariant we have all types of engineers, including data, mechanical, software, robotics, and machine learning engineers, just to name a few. Given our vast range of area expertise, it’s imperative that we are open to collaborating with one another on a regular basis. This goes beyond just engineering – you’ll also interact with people working on business development, web design, and marketing. And regardless of what you do, you will be within 40 feet of a robot. We are all self-starters who like bridging our knowledge gaps and working together with folks to make the most impact.

We’re deliberate in integrating all of the different orgs because our solution depends on collaboration. We’re constantly talking with one another.

Once a week, we have a "Tea Time" meeting to review recent incident reports from our patients. This meeting always includes members from pharmacy, patient care, pharmacy operations, engineering, and design because we believe in a cross-functional approach to resolve the underlying issue(s) for any unhappy patient. Together, we figure out why these problems happened and what we can do to prevent them in the future.

The problem Alto is solving is so complex that it requires the skill sets of a very broad team. Engineers need to work with pharmacists, designers need to work with our operations team, and the people who manage our partnerships with physicians and insurance providers need to be on the same page, too. Engineers, pharmacists, and operations sit together, lunch together, and we’re constantly talking.

We have this venn diagram of developers, designers, and product-focused leaders to create our balanced team.

We really push hard within Carbon Five, as well as with our clients, to have diversity across skills. We also look for people that have low ego; strong opinions are welcome if they are loosely held. Almost every one of our developers wants to know that the thing they’re building is being used. Even if it’s not specific to product or design, they like understanding the value of what it is they’re building and having input on it.

We operate as One Brex and not in silo.

Regardless of what team you join, you will work with different stakeholders across the company and gain a lot of exposure to all aspects of Brex’s business. Today, most of our major initiatives involve cross-functional work across multiple departments. We attribute the bulk of our company’s success to this approach of cross-departmental collaboration. Specifically, early collaboration across teams ranging from engineering, design, and product to finance, legal, and operations has allowed us to understand and build very complex financial products.

As an engineer at Brex, you will never be silo-ed or feel like you are on an island of your own. Another way we promote “cross-pollination” of ideas and perspectives, we host an annual company-wide hackathon to unleash everyone’s creative spirits. Different teams and functions come together to hack on projects ranging from designing brand new merchant icons to launching Brex Rewind – a retrospective video surfacing how our customers have grown in 2020 amidst all the challenges they encountered! Hackathons are always fun bonding experiences at Brex, and also productive!

Our seating reflects how much each department collaborates with one another.

Engineers, analysts, product, and interns all sit together and are interspersed. Our product requires expertise in multiple fields and it’s really at the intersection where we build. Teams are constantly working together and making use of the various whiteboards we have around the office, stationed in open spaces for all to see. It’s apparent when you walk into the office that information flows naturally and teams don’t feel segregated from one another. Similarly, there’s no sign of hierarchy as our leadership works alongside their team members.

At the Connected office, our executives work side-by-side with our engineers, who work side-by-side with our designers, who work side-by-side with...you get it.

By bringing together engineers, designers, and strategists, the opportunity to unblock a problem or brainstorm a new idea is always possible. It takes many perspectives to make a great digital product.

On a more fun note, we recently incorporated a House System whereby Connected team members are divided across departments into official “houses,” which compete against each other in various company-wide activities, with prizes (and glory) to be won. Previous events have included a scavenger hunt, a trivia night, and a spelling bee. These team-building activities help create an atmosphere of collaboration by bringing the entire team together and breaking down barriers between departments.

Our desk arrangements are unstructured, with people often sitting with others outside of their specific discipline.

Why? Because this allows for a higher degree of ambient knowledge sharing. It is typical for engineers to work with stakeholders outside of the engineering organization, even if the problems they are solving seem purely technical. For example, trust is fundamental to our marketplace. Engineers recently built scam detection tools to ward off bad actors. They collaborated with the customer success team who deals with users who may have been affected to best understand the types of scams. This unlocked a whole series of ideas and approaches informing further iterations.

We love spending time with one another.

We prioritize working together and collaboration over individual heroics here at Cameo. Our team believes in collective responsibility for excellence over relying on dedicated resources. With a consumer facing product at the core of everything we do, our departments are inherently cross-collaborative. Whether it’s receiving feedback from Talent to build new features, or working closely with Design to build experiences that delight, all of our teams rely on one another.

Our tech (shipping team) meets weekly for Tech Fun, where we are broken into random teams every quarter to play games against one another, such as Trivia, Among Us, and Geoguessr. To make sure everyone at the company gets to know each other, we use the donut app through Slack, which matches you with a new co-worker every two weeks. Everyone gets to know one another and share lunch, coffee, or drinks virtually (great time to spend our monthly Grubhub stipend!). You could be matched with someone in London, Australia, or Argentina for a fun Zoom session!

We work as one team.

We place a high value on the ability to work well with others because bridging work across departments is the fastest way to learn and iterate. Great products cannot be built by one person or one team alone; it takes close collaborations and regular interactions to build something great. To that end, we engage all departments in the process of building successful products. For example, sales and operations work closely together; sales shares the new insights they’re hearing from customers and operations shares feedback from an internal user perspective.

We work in a large open space segmented by department workspaces, but individuals from different teams are always accessible and welcome to stop by and say “hey!” 👋 We also leverage a tool called Donut, which regularly connects people across departments to meet over coffee, a meal, a walk, or even just a video call. By regularly connecting people across various departments we can share ideas and build rapport so people can easily collaborate on hard problems.

From our matrixed product teams to our Slides Carnival each year, everything we do at Seesaw is cross-functional.

We love mixing things up and making sure we’re hearing ideas and feedback from everyone at the company. Our product teams are organized cross-functionally (1 product manager, 1 product designer, and a handful of engineers), which then rotate every quarter or two. This ensures that every component from ideation to execution is taken into consideration and also gives people the chance to explore different interests, apply their skill sets to different product areas, and work with different people.

In order to develop our product roadmap, we create opportunities for individuals to share their ideas, feedback, and stories from interacting with our users. We make sure to involve members from every team (sales, engineering, content, community) so that we know exactly what will deliver the most value to our students, teachers, and parents.

Finally, at the end of every year, we do a Slides Carnival where everyone at the company creates one slide with an idea or improvement for the company. They can be small fixes or moonshots, something you can do, or a project completely outside of your department. We then have a Carnival where you have 60 seconds to pitch your idea to the company. It’s a tradition of ours that is incredibly fun, but also powerfully creative. Many ideas have come to fruition as a result of Slides Carnival like our Creative Corner (we’ll explain below, so keep reading!).

As a four-sided marketplace, cross-functional collaboration is critical to our success.

We serve four key stakeholders:

1. consumers using our app to order groceries,
2. shoppers who are in-store and fulfilling grocery orders,
3. brick and mortar retailers on our platform, and
4. consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies who serve ads in our consumer app.

Internally, we’re organized in four key groups to serve each of our stakeholders. Each technical team is comprised of mobile and full-stack engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, and infrastructure engineers. We work together to build our mobile and web apps, B2B software, fulfillment chain technologies, and advertising networks. Given how dynamic our four-sided marketplace is, engineers regularly work with product designers, product managers, finance, marketing, communications, and many other teams to scope projects, prepare for scale, and launch new features.

Silos should not exist between teams.

Our technical and commercial teams work together with the common objective to improve our products. Since we have now evolved into a Fin Tech company with aspects of Customer Transaction Management, it is vital for the Business team to be in absolute sync with the Technical Team. We achieve this by trying to keep everyone on the same page with regular meetings. We have two dev meetings a week, one business meeting each week, and a full team meeting once a month. As an engineer, you will work alongside your engineering peers as well as members in other departments.

At Sensor Tower, the work you do is not limited to just one team.

Our engineers work closely with all departments to make sure we are putting out the best product we can. From dedicated Slack channels, to cross-department team meetings and events, our engineering team works closely with all departments both for work and social events.

Our sales teams work closely with engineers, too, as it enables us to provide the most accurate and relevant insights to our customers. Engineers also regularly communicate with our customer success team so we can provide top-tier customer support and bug fixes. Finally, our data science team works closely with our marketing department to provide analytical insights that are used in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch. (We’re quoted often!)

If you’re interested in joining our team, please check out our open roles and reach out!