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.

We foster social interaction across departments through our open office layout, company-wide events, and with the Donut app for Slack, which pairs teammates who don't usually work together to set up a break for a donut, coffee, or walk outside the office. It’s optional, but a great way to get to know your teammates in a less formal setting. Remote engineers engage with the rest of the company via Slack, Zoom conferencing, and a robust in-office onboarding experience with regular visits to HQ.

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.

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!

Dev.xyz services several different businesses under one roof.

Dev.xyz is the development company within our family of tech companies. We provide the engineering and development services for our other entities which means that our development team works in a variety of industries and we work with different coworkers depending on the project at hand. Regardless of the project, engineers engage and collaborate with peers in sales, biz dev, legal/compliance, and marketing throughout the course of the project. We all share one open room (no cubicles or offices), and we have a shared kitchen and communal areas where we often get to interact with members of other departments, even if we’re not currently working with them on a project.

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.

Regardless of what team you’re on, it’s likely that you’ll be doing cross-functional work.

We work collaboratively at Box. Whether it’s with the diverse group of people on your current team or with people from various departments, it’s important that everyone we hire is able to and enjoys working with others. Our interview process has both technical and cultural components and we care less about if you solve the problem and more about how you communicate with someone as you’re working through it.

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.

Working cross-team is one of the most unique aspects of working at Thread.

We’re bringing together stylists, engineers, and data scientists to reshape how retail works. These teams work together every day to develop new tools and approaches. We’re also interested in and actively applying machine learning to other aspects of the business. For instance, we are building tools to help predict what users are going to want to buy rather than relying on archaic merchandising practices.

As a cross-functional company, we also always celebrate our successes together as a whole company. We truly are the sum of our parts, which is why we we take time to thank each other at the end of every week for the help we’ve received from one another. Finally, we also spend time together outside of the office. We budget time to do fun things together, with some recent highlights including axe throwing, an augmented reality treasure hunt, and Thanksgiving dinner.

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 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.

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 want 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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re constantly talking with each other because Alto's solution depends on collaboration.

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 skillsets 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 rely on everyone contributing their ideas.

Ideas can come from anywhere at Aero, regardless of your title or department. As a company, we sit together and do standups together. As engineers, we probably learn more from our Community Manager and Operations team than they do us. For example, our VP of Engineering Gabe often sits with Greg, who is in Ops, so that he can understand what the actual daily routine is. By understanding what it required in the day-to-day for booking flights, we can then use technology to alleviate those pain points.

Ben also sits with Jamie to learn about Facebook and Google ad campaigns. We put an emphasis on sitting down with the person you want to work with, outlining an objective together, and tackling it as a team. We aren’t dogmatic at all about pairing, but there are certainly times when pairing is appropriate and a helpful practice when it’s needed. It helps us understand how we work.

As another example of how we collaborate, we recently did an exercise where everyone gathered in one room to brainstorm for an entire day. We discussed what the ideal customer experience should be and then voted on one another’s ideas. This helped us determine our product roadmap.

Engineers at YC work directly with founders and YC partners, as well as our legal, finance, outreach, and operations teams.

Our goal is simple: scale YC and continuously get better at funding excellent founders and big ideas. It’s a job that is never finished, and the next software hire will do the same work that we all do. You can expect to sit with the engineering team in our open office in San Francisco, working directly with founders and YC staff.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, all of YC’s partners work with the founders at our Mountain View office doing “Group Office Hours”. Office hours allow founders to meet with partners and talk through problems they’re having. On these evenings, we have dinner and a talk from one of our successful YC founders (think Airbnb, Segment, and PlanGrid founders). Members of the software team are encouraged to get to know the founders, have dinner with them, attend the talks, and occasionally sit in on office hours. As a YC engineer, you also have the opportunity to participate in YC’s interview process (where companies fly in from all over the world to meet with YC partners and potentially join the batch). At the end of each batch, when we have demo day, YC’s software team manages the software and attends the event with the rest of the organization. It’s an exciting and unusual job! Tell us if you think so too.

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.

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.

The collaboration between Product and Customer Success is our X factor.

Our Product team is currently made up of two people: the founders. Matt and I (Tom) are both engineers and we have a weekly standing meeting with our Customer Success team to discuss customer feedback (what’s going well, what’re they struggling with). We are incredibly proud of our Customer Success team, which is composed of seven incredible people who are distributed and true experts of our customers’ businesses. While we’ve built a self-serve onboarding process for new customers, we maintain that providing high-quality support from real humans is the key to satisfied and loyal users. (Our NPS scores are always in the high 60’s!)

We lean heavily on Customer Success to know what to build and how to build it. They are heavily involved in giving feedback on specs, and during feature development, we always have a staging server so that they can thoroughly test and give us feedback. All new engineering and product hires can expect to work closely with our Customer Success team.

Understanding how the business works improves the code we release.

The best way to familiarize yourself with our product is to use it, which is why everyone at the company is entitled to one G Adventures trip per year. Even when you’re not traveling, one thing you’ll often hear is that you don’t have to be coding 100% of the time. In fact, we hope you don’t. How much you interact with other departments depends on your exact role, but you can expect to work closely with other departments on a daily or weekly basis. We do this so that developers can learn how the business works, how we can best serve our users, and have the necessary context to engineer quality solutions for our customers.

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.

Collaboration is key.

Since the Ribbon product has many different internal stakeholders (finance, sales, marketing, operations, engineering, etc.), it’s essential that we collaborate in everything we do. For example, we’ve recently had our engineers travel to Charlotte to sit in with our transaction coordination and real estate operations teams to understand their workflow and take in ideas for how to make our product better. Upon returning to New York, they made it a reality, making our transaction coordination process more streamlined with the assistance of our product. This sort of collaboration is pervasive across all of our product teams at Ribbon.