Engineering teams that eat lunch together on Key Values

Flexport

Leading Software-Powered Freight Forwarder

San Francisco, Bellevue, Amsterdam, and Shenzhen
We like our coworkers.

We think it’s important to like the people you work with, which is why we invest heavily in building relationships within and between teams. Our onsite lunch catering and large kitchen spaces make it easy for teams to eat together. To that end, we try to keep our teams small enough to fit around one or two kitchen tables. If it's nice outside, some teams might leave the building and eat in a nearby park, or they’ll take their lunches to a room to watch videos or chat about topics of interest.

Teams also have offsite budgets to spend as they wish. In the past, teams have gone to lunches, pedicures, escape rooms, karaoke, woodshop classes, baseball games, and more. Onsite, it’s not uncommon for people to get together for things like book clubs, board game sessions, poker games, and Super Smash tournaments.

At the end of the day, our teams are cross-functional, and you aren’t limited to only forging relationships with people who do the same thing as you. An engineer can expect to get to know designers, product managers, business leaders, and operations folks. What’s more, a lot of people like to use a Slack extension called Donut, which matches up random people across the company every two weeks, regardless of role, and invites them to go grab a donut or coffee and become acquaintances.

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33 Open Positions
BuildZoom

Marketplace for Construction and Remodeling

San Francisco, CA
A good litmus test for company health is whether people eat lunch together or not!

It’s well known that meetings can stifle an engineer’s workflow, and while we can share company-wide news through newsletters and Slack channels, we’ve found that the best way to improve the “glue” is to let it happen organically over lunch. For example, an engineer might overhear our operations team complaining about a particular contract and connect the dots to a recent feature push that may have been the root cause. Every day, when our catered lunch arrives, everyone stops working to eat lunch with members of their own team and connect with people from other departments. This is the time for spontaneous collaboration and cross-pollination. Some companies underestimate the value of having everyone eat lunch with their peers. We don’t.

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1 Open Positions
- Lead Software Engineer, Data Platform
Monograph

A simple back-office tool for architects

San Francisco, CA or Remote (US)
There’s always a great conversation at our long table, and it’s never about work.

Lunch time is casual for us, but it’s also an important part of our day. Friends frequently drop by and we talk about everything from bitcoin, VR, and gaming to what we’re doing on our off days (okay, sometimes those overlap). We’ll often go grab lunch together from somewhere near our Mission/SOMA office, or everyone will bring their own lunch. (We do this when we try to be healthy.)

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4 Open Positions
Honor

In Home Care Services

San Francisco, CA and Austin, TX
We share family-style lunches every day.

We provide lunch 3 days per week and commonly take trips out together when we don’t (particularly if it involves a visit to the local Blue Bottle Cafe). On any given day, our communal kitchen table sports homemade pie (particularly popular on 3/14), lemons from a backyard tree, or treats brought back from exotic trips. The generous spirit that fuels our product development also fuels our stomachs. And while we enjoy eating lunch together, we’ll also sometimes eat dinner together after a team happy hour!

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26 Open Positions
Treasury Prime

Connecting fintechs with banks to build great financial products

San Francisco, CA or Remote (US)
We have great benefits, and buying you lunch is one of them.

We’re a small, lively team who honestly enjoy each other’s company. We reimburse your lunch on work days, and we love spending the time together to enjoy good food, unwind, and talk about world events, our lives outside of work, or that burning product issue we’re so passionate about.

Plans are fluid: sometimes we go out but mostly we bring food back to the office. (Choosing where to grab lunch is often a lively conversation!) Of course, participation is not mandatory, but we’ll miss you on the days you have other plans.

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4 Open Positions
SportsRecruits

Recruiting Platform for College-Bound Student-Athletes

Brooklyn, NY
Who doesn’t like eating lunch together?

The MetroTech Commons is right outside our building and is surrounded by eateries which are almost all on MealPal. Team members will usually find a table and congregate there to talk about anything from the latest Laravel LTS version to how they feel about the new iPhoneX.

We also have regularly scheduled lunch events called Lunch and Learns where someone in the company will present insights from their department or teach a skill they are a master of. Some notable topics are playing guitar, SQL, closing deals, and video editing.

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1 Open Positions
- SEO Engineer
Precious

AI to Organize Your Photos of Your Kids

San Francisco, CA
We realize we started out as two brothers just grabbing lunch together every day, but it’s a ritual we’ll always keep no matter how big our team is.

We always want to find time to take a break, step away from what we’re focusing in, and touch base with one another. Sometimes it’s about work, and sometimes it’s not. Either way, it’s important to us on principle that teams enjoy the time they spend with their peers and make it a priority to catch up over food. We’re currently moving to a bigger office space, but we like to leave the office, get a scene change, and buy lunch somewhere each day.

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2 Open Positions
- Senior Full-Stack Engineer
- Lead Product Designer
Airtable

A collaborative toolkit enabling anyone to create software

San Francisco or Mountain View
We have company-sponsored healthy lunches daily in our physical office locations, but we think several features of our lunchtime are unusual.

First, our office culture (see below!) encourages a high proportion of quiet, focused work time, so lunchtime provides a compensating opportunity for social bonding and the informal, osmotic diffusion of knowledge and ideas. We embrace this break in the middle of the day as a valuable part of the way our business works. Our primary motivation for providing lunch in the office has nothing to do with time efficiency. In fact, we are experimenting with ways to layer more supported social interaction into our culture. (One experiment we're running is a cultural event series, where small groups attend outside events such as plays and concerts together.)

Second, we consciously make an effort not to sit by team. Engineers, recruiters, salespeople, and other customer-facing staff all mix at our lunch tables every day. This leads to more diverse conversations as well as a team that is more attuned to the needs of customers and the company.

Lastly, every Friday, we have “Show and Tell”, an all-hands meeting that overlaps with the second half of Pacific Time lunch. Scheduling our all-hands at lunchtime allows a larger proportion of people to attend, compared to an all-hands held at the end of the day, when parents are often running for the exits. (Of course, the presentations are also recorded, for anyone who isn’t available during that time.)

At Show and Tell, anyone, regardless of seniority, is encouraged to sign up (in an Airtable base shared company-wide, of course) to present anything worth sharing with a broader audience. We often kick off the meeting with a brief slide of pet photos (Airtable <3 animals) and then launch into short presentations. The content varies widely, but often includes demos of features-in-progress, reports of customer conversations, and more formal company-wide announcements. Show and Tell is a crucial and ever-evolving part of our culture, and we wouldn't be the same company without it.

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19 Open Positions
Checkr

API for Background Checks

San Francisco, CA or Denver, CO
We have lunch together.

Our cross-team and cross-functional collaboration happen naturally as we all like to have lunch together every day. Our free, catered-in lunch is just an added perk of sitting down with a colleague and enjoying a meal together. Don't you end up eating with the same people who you normally hang out with anyways, you might ask? Not at Checkr! We have a built-in opportunity to join an optional group lunch every Friday with randomly selected people throughout the company, so you get to know and stay connected with each other better.

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10 Open Positions
Instacart

Groceries delivered from local stores

San Francisco, Toronto, or Remote (US, Ontario, British Columbia)
We eat together every day.

Lunches are catered daily at Instacart and eating together has become an important part of our culture over the years. A good meal can bring people together in a powerful way, and we love sharing stories, getting to know one another, and bonding over delicious food.

We also take advantage of lunchtime to host regular “Hackers Lunch” meetings every Thursday. While these are optional in both our SF and Toronto offices, they’re a great opportunity to practice our public speaking skills and share what projects we’ve been working on with folks that aren’t in your immediate team. In the past, people have presented on topics like The New PagerDuty, Efficient Services, Technical Writing for Fun and Profit, and Building Availability Models. Once a month, we also have our technical all-hands meeting where we do deep dives into cross-departmental projects.

Of course, if anyone wants or needs to get some Super Smash Brothers in during their workday, we have a club that meets during lunch. 😉

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39 Open Positions
Peergrade

Peer Feedback for Teachers and Students

Copenhagen, Denmark
We have a healthy catered lunch in the office every day (also allowing for vegan / vegetarian options).

Lunch is the time of the day where we can relax and talk about non-work related things. We have a private office in a co-working space, so there is always life around us. At least once a month there is an event in the co-working space that some people from our team participate in.

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1 Open Positions
- Senior Frontend Developer
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Engineering teams that eat lunch together

We like our coworkers.

A good litmus test for company health is whether people eat lunch together or not!

There’s always a great conversation at our long table, and it’s never about work.

We share family-style lunches every day.

We have great benefits, and buying you lunch is one of them.

Who doesn’t like eating lunch together?

We realize we started out as two brothers just grabbing lunch together every day, but it’s a ritual we’ll always keep no matter how big our team is.

We have company-sponsored healthy lunches daily in our physical office locations, but we think several features of our lunchtime are unusual.

We have lunch together.

We eat together every day.

We have a healthy catered lunch in the office every day (also allowing for vegan / vegetarian options).

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