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.

One of our company values is cross-functional empathy.

This plays a big role in how people at Lever interact with one another. We’re looking for team players who have empathy for the particular challenges of a given role or team. Any time there’s a challenge, we always make the assumption that everyone is doing their best and lean in to support one another rather than pointing fingers.

As an engineer, you can expect to work closely with the customer support team to learn about any pain points our customers are facing or bugs that need to be fixed. You’ll also interface with project managers (who set the tasks and organize the team), project owners (who do the research to come up with what the feature will be), as well as designers. If an issue can’t be easily resolved in Slack, we’re quick to hop on a huddle call to help move things forward. You should feel empowered and comfortable to reach out to anyone in any department if you need help or more information.

At the end of the day, while technical skill is important, we prefer candidates who can communicate what they’re working on and bring everyone on board.

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 work as much with other company functions as we do together.

At Rune, we deeply value learning from one another. Our Product and Engineering teams work together on every project. Features have kickoff meetings where Product starts by walking engineers through the conversations they’ve had with stakeholders, whether it's patients, clinicians, researchers, or business partners. We hear the user stories and pain points. From there, we arrive at requirements together, so that everyone feels it's feasible, the scope is acceptable, the motivation is understood, and the solution is maintainable and valuable to as many different stakeholders as possible.

When working directly on data, which is often, engineers work hand-in-hand with our Neuroscience team as well. We learn about not just the structure of datasets, but also the semantics of the data and how it will be used to answer questions about the patient’s state and health.

While we value our heads-down maker time, it’s almost impossible to work alone at Rune. We have many deep technical challenges, but not the kind that can be solved well by going to a dark corner for months to tackle alone, because so much of the knowledge you need to solve them correctly lives with other people. We are not just implementing a solution to a problem – we're actively figuring out the neuroscience and data science day-by-day alongside the biggest research and clinical labs in the country, and even abroad. As new discoveries are made, we are right there too, supporting them with technology, and implementing their techniques for the entire community to make progress together.

We are all very chatty on Slack, we jump on Zoom calls when needed, and rely heavily on Quip to document everything clearly in writing so decisions and details are not lost in chat or in-person calls. While half the company is in the SF Bay Area, we're also very conscious not to ever make our remote peers feel like second class citizens.

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!

One of our core values is that we ‘Take Action, Together.’

In order to do that, we must have an environment that fosters trust based on autonomy, clarity, and accountability. We have a shared mindset to “see something, do something, and bring people along in doing it.” Data flows through every aspect of our company: our sales team works to help prospective partners understand the value they can get from working with PicnicHealth data; our Patient team helps patients work with us to unlock and retrieve their data, empowering them in their care; our Records and Operations teams work to digitize, extract, and organize valuable, key medical concepts from the records; our Clinical and Quantitative Science team works with our Data team to ensure we can deliver data that meets our research partners’ goals. As a result, our success as a company is closely tied to our ability to collaborate across teams. The quality of our product is directly tied to our ability to collaborate effectively. The only way to grow and scale is to empower everyone to be able to identify and act on opportunities, which makes working together a default expectation.

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.

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.

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 believe the best solutions come from leveraging different perspectives and strengths.

As a Product team (Engineering, Product Management, Product Design, and Data Science), we’re always looking to solve a web of interconnected challenges. One way we do this is by shadowing the care team, to understand how our software affects our customers’ day-to-day lives in action. This is something we used to do in-person pre-pandemic, but we’re finding creative ways to do so remotely (think screen shares), especially as we transition to a fully-distributed team.

Whether it’s helping a care professional clock in and out, update care plans, or share notes with families after visits, these workflows are intertwined and complex. That’s why it’s so important that we work cross-functionally to determine how technology can uplevel the high-touch service our teammates and care professionals are delivering. We work closely with Design and PM throughout a project lifecycle to gain a closer view on care workflows and contribute to an early discussion on product approaches and implementation strategies. Ultimately, our approach is about the strongest solution, which comes from all of us working together to shape the product and determine the right product for our use cases.

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 is by hosting 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!

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 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!

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.

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!).

You’ll work with Customer Support Heroes, Trust & Safety, Marketing, and more.

Building great products is an all-company effort, and engineers can expect to work with many different people across several teams. We share resources by following a “Home and Away” model. Every engineer has a “home” team. When another team needs more resources, you’ll have the chance to lend your expertise, and be “away” for a short period of time. If you’re “away,” there will always be a transition back to your “home” team. This practice provides a level of stability so that you always have a home team, and you’re still able to “jump in” and leverage your expertise when needed on different projects, encouraging the cross-pollination of diverse perspectives from other teams. Another way we foster shared learning and insights is via our guilds, which allow team members within the same discipline (front-end, back-end, architecture, data, etc.) to get together regularly. Ultimately, this tight-knit collaboration and flexibility allow us to build our members’ best possible product and experience.

In 2020, we launched our Customer Advocates Program, embedding a few of our Customer Support Heroes in our Product and Engineering teams. They work collaboratively on product requirements and surface important customer pain points early in the process to ensure customer needs are understood and addressed.

Quarterly planning is a collaborative process across the company, and we actively seek input from everyone. We’re radically transparent about our priorities and work to ensure everyone feels they have a voice and a platform.

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.