Engineering teams that engage with their communities

Fostering community is at the core of who we are as individuals and a company.

Our mission is to unlock the power of communities by providing the tools to quantify impact and deliver stellar member experiences.

Many of our team members have deep ties to community engagement and management. Our co-founders, Patrick and Josh, have helped build developer communities at companies like Algolia and Keen IO. Patrick regularly writes about community in publications like a16z Future and Inc. Magazine. Josh also maintains various open source projects and regularly speaks at community events. Together, they created the Orbit Model, an open source framework that has helped thousands of organizations measure and grow their communities.

Ryan, our VP of Product is based in San Francisco and was co-founder of Keen IO where he was a regular contributor and a key sponsor of the company’s community engagement. More recently, Ryan headed up product teams at Square and Zendesk where he supported the building of tools that drove deeper community connections.

Nicolas, an Orbit software leader based in Paris, expanded his engineering skill set thanks to community sharing of videos, online courses, and other content. He was driven to give back and started writing blogs, speaking at meetups, and attending conferences. This led him to found JAMstack Paris, a meetup group for dev engineers where he met Josh.

Alex is a junior software engineer who spent all of 2020 building her coding skills with the goal of making a career transition into web development. Along the way, she built a community by documenting her journey and blogging about her progress, as well as starting a podcast and email newsletter for other creative women along their own coding journeys. She's also a mentor for other early-career developers at The Collab Lab.

Chance is a senior software engineer based in San Francisco, CA. After spending the past five years building developer tools for companies like Librato, he’s all in on the importance of growing developer communities. He believes the purpose of software is solving actual problems for people and will always advocate on behalf of the user.

Community is no longer a place. Your membership is based on your passion, interests, and needs regardless of where you are physically, which makes the work at Orbit more pressing than ever before. Engineers who join the team should be similarly passionate about engaging in the community and excited about helping businesses do so on a larger scale. If that sounds like you, definitely reach out!

Providing healthcare services to diverse populations is at the core of what we do.

Our mission is to help everyone lead the healthiest life that science and medicine can offer. One way we do that is by partnering with organizations to help them deliver preventive care and wellness screenings, COVID-19 management and mitigation programs, and other basic healthcare services directly to their employees, whether in the office or remote. Our software also supports public health programs by connecting communities to local sites and labs for testing, immunization, and other care, while easily integrating with existing systems. Last but not least, we support end-to-end research programs, including patient enrollment and consenting, testing, return of results to the research sponsor and the patient, and ongoing patient engagement. For example, we received a $4.6M grant to collaborate with the National Institutes of Health’s “All of Us” genomics research program, reflecting diverse populations.

At the onset of the pandemic, we knew there had to be a better way to provide direct-to-population testing. In addition to being at the forefront of sequencing new variants, we’re also helping our communities by developing models to help keep kids in school. As an engineer who joins the team, the work you do will have a real-world impact from day one.

Community is at the center of two of our 5 core beliefs as a company:

1. We are a company in service of a community in service of a movement.
2. We build building blocks for builders.

Our open source community is our most important asset, above even our protocol and products. As a central part of the dweb movement, we believe in open, collaborative, and composale development. We’ve seen firsthand how rapidly a strong and engaged community can innovate, far outpacing what a single team can do itself.

Everyone on the team spends time with the community, we regularly sponsor projects or hire from the community, and everything we build is designed with the community in mind. We regularly host community calls, work in the open in Discord, and routinely host hackathons and other events.

Money is personal and people aren’t algorithms, which is why education is key.

We’re an inclusive community and strongly believe our services shouldn’t be off-limits to people in need. For instance, during the height of the pandemic, we paused membership dues for those affected. We also have an awesome puzzle wall of donations and we give those funds to clients who need a little extra help.

In addition to 1-on-1 education through our formal training sessions, we also engage with the community by regularly hosting educational and fun meetups and events (which are open to anyone, not just clients) at our HQ in NYC. These events will also take place at our new LA, DC, and Brooklyn offices. For example, our “Wine and Learn” events include topics like Investing 101, The Art of Travel Hacking, and How to Meal Prep on a Budget. While they’ve been remote during COVID-19, we hope to be back in-person as soon as it’s safe to do so.

We also have monthly “Regional FinFit Group” meetups in various cities at bars or coworking spaces (again virtual for now). These are run by enthusiastic clients (anyone who wants to raise their hand) and we reimburse them for the costs. Engineers are more than welcome to participate in these events, in-person and remotely.

Finally, we also offer resources on our blog including articles about how to maximize your credit card perks and why you should still save for travel (even if you can’t go anywhere right now). You can also check out Martinis and Your Money, a podcast hosted by our CEO Shannon McLay, which covers topics like how to crush student loan debt and entrepreneurship. In particular, we recommend checking out the “Financially Naked” episodes (one of the podcast’s most popular series), which mimics what a client’s very first session with their trainer would be like. It’s a great place to start if you’re curious about how our mission can help people from all walks of life. We recommend this episode featuring Sean, one of our full-stack software developers.

Everyone at Classy is driven by the mission of using technology to effect positive social change.

We’re proud to be in a unique position as both a Public Benefit Corporation and Certified B Corp, actively balancing purpose and profit. As a mission-driven company whose goal is to make giving easier and advance the social sector, we practice what we preach. One way we do that is with the Collaborative, an annual conference designed to bring together thousands of nonprofit and social sector professionals. Topics cover everything from fundraising and marketing, organizational priorities and finances, current technology, leadership in times of crisis, resilience, and more.

We’re also dedicated to sustainability and believe supporting our environment helps our community at-large. To that end, we partner with Project Green, a Classy Community that influences corportable sustainability policies and practices, educates and engages employees, and leads by example with our customers and vendors.

As part of our Pledge 1% commitment, we invest 1% of our top-line revenue back to the nonprofit sector that we serve. We also encourage employees to give back to causes they are passionate about with employee volunteer time off. If you’re excited about the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with nonprofits, and see the code you ship directly impact real-world change, we encourage you to reach out.

Driver’s Seat is a cooperative.

Our community is rideshare and delivery drivers, first and foremost, which is why we formed our company as a cooperative. In addition to having a built-in community from day one, it also fosters transparency and trust. Our drivers always know exactly what’s happening with their data and have real ownership over it. They elect a majority of our board seats, vote on major co-op decisions, and are eligible for a share of our profits.

Whether it’s chatting online or in person, we’re in constant communication with our drivers. These conversations help us keep a pulse on what our users/members truly need, so we can make sure we’re building the best product possible. For example, in speaking to hundreds of drivers, we learned that there are multiple ways they think about cost/benefit analyses. Some drivers care most about maximizing $/hr while others prioritize $/mile or even “time until I hit my daily goal.” Thus, in addition to showing “Real Pay” on our platform, we are also building out those unique metrics so drivers can have personalized insights that benefit them the most.

Our community also extends to organized groups of drivers. Through partnerships, we’re enabling these groups to pool information with each other so they can analyze even more data points. This is especially helpful for understanding how new regulatory changes or shifts in the market affect their work. It also allows them to share their stores and advocate for themselves, with the data to back it up.

As a cooperative, we’re in a unique position to cultivate a diverse user base to shape our direction. In the next year, we plan to expand our community by creating spaces for drivers to look at shared data together, discuss their experiences, and work together to improve how the gig economy works in their markets. This means building member-to-member communication channels and forums as well as creating tools to make it easier for drivers to recruit one another to join our co-op. The more our community grows, the greater our shared dataset is, which in turn makes community membership even more valuable. It’s a win-win on all sides!

We see ourselves as denizens of a broader community.

As a company, we want to recognize the role tech plays in a greater context and create inclusive communities both internally and for our customers. We identify as denizens – part of the local and national community – working to protect privacy by making data access safe and secure for everyone. While this is our company’s mission and focus, we also want to do more. As a team, we commit time and effort to initiatives to help people vote, help run infrastructure for COVID-19 research, and have thoughtful company holidays like Election Day.

Our dedication to serving our greater community is something we’ve bonded over. Before we worked together on Indent, we collaborated on privacy-first tools to help people find their polling place and a ballot tool that encrypted your data so no one else could see your ballot. We helped around 3 million people get out to vote with Vote.org in 2018. While we’re no longer working on voter participation tools, this experience served as a launching point for how we can make products and decisions that align our business initiatives with meaningful improvements to the privacy of so many people.

Trade-offs: As a team, we participate in our communities and do what we can to advocate for accessible privacy as a right. We see our product as the sum of our abilities, perspectives, and beliefs to help restore trust in tech.

We believe community extends both inside and outside the walls of Instacart.

From an engineering perspective, we love talking about what we’re working on with the greater engineering community. We share best practices at our SF HQ and our Toronto engineering hubs; host popular podcasts (Kaushik Gopal, Senior Staff Engineer, is the co-host of the Android podcast, Fragmented); demo and speak at conferences (Lesbians Who Tech, Pycon, DroidCon, ElastiCon, Collision); and regularly contribute to open source projects (Coil, Lore, Jardin, TrueTime, Arn, and more). With grocery as core to our business and, well, everyone, we encourage all employees to stay involved in the greater community around them, like neighborhood food banks and organizations addressing pressing issues like food insecurity.

Our Social Impact Program “Instacart Serves” aims to nourish its communities by helping to remove barriers to food access and enriching the lives of our communities through an annual volunteer week of service, grocery donations, disaster relief, and giving campaigns. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve donated over 7 million meals to communities disproportionately affected by food insecurity and natural disasters. We’ve also created new partnerships with nonprofits like No Kid Hungry, Feeding America, and the Boys and Girls of Club of America to make grocery delivery more accessible and affordable for all.

Instacart Serves currently focuses its support across three main areas:

• Food Insecurity. The majority of our philanthropic support is dedicated to helping to remove barriers to food access and hunger relief with our primary giving partner, Feeding America. We also recognize that food insecurity disproportionately affects diverse communities and work to also raise awareness for this growing inequity.
• Supporting Traditionally Marginalized Communities. We are committed to actionable change and standing up for injustice and equity, and support organizations that challenge economic injustice and work to uplift traditionally marginalized communities.
• Disaster Relief. In the event of natural disasters which severely impact the communities in which our customers, employees, and shoppers work and live, we provide disaster relief through financial or grocery donations to centers and organizations which support evacuees and first responders.

We’re always looking for feedback from our creators about how we can make their lives better.

Our mission is to empower everyone to build the internet, so it’s imperative that we listen closely to our creators. Our support lead Braley tracks things she’s hearing from the frontlines and compiles them to share every Monday during our all-hands kickoff call. These insights directly impact our product roadmap and the features we focus on. We also love seeing the passion people have for our product. A great example of this is when we brought on Braden – one of our most avid supporters who also happens to be a high school student – to join us part-time on our dedicated support team, after he reached out repeatedly to share his ideas. (And after spending some time with us, he’s expanded his role into our first engineering intern!)

When COVID-19 hit, we saw a huge influx of new creators, many of whom were now relying on Universe as a path to starting a business and generating income after losing a job in the pandemic. In addition to massively expanding our commerce tools (including the download block and shopping cart), we’ve now launched a lightweight, browser-based interface to build links in bios. We have many more exciting things coming up to continue serving our community of creators.

We are more motivated by impact than money.

Given our strong ties to WordPress and Tumblr, participating and making an impact in the web community has always been at the forefront of working at Automattic. One community-building staple: WordCamp, informal conferences organized locally by people in the WordPress community. Automatticians regularly attend, speak, or volunteer to help organize WordCamp, and if there isn’t a WordCamp within 60 miles/100 kilometers, we cover expenses for attending.

Automatticians getting involved in local or global communities, for software developers and beyond, including Head of Mobile Eli Budelli speaking at try! Swift, and JS Engineer Lena Morita, serving as a Director of the Tokyo chapter of Woman Who Code.

Giving back to the developer community — on WordPress and beyond — is a greater priority today than ever before in our company’s history. Understanding and improving diversity of all types in our hiring and team composition has taken center stage. We’re proud to share our recent study of how technical women can best navigate their careers, but that’s only a beginning. We work on diversity and inclusion each day, whether it’s participating in Mindset Month (a 6-module video series) with our partners at the CoachDiversity Institute, supporting internal committees, or continually iterating our approach to diversity and inclusion.

We encourage everyone to write blogs, give talks, and contribute to the community in any way.

Our team members speak at conferences all over the country including Railsconf, ElixirConf, QCon, O’Reilly, Strangeloop, SXSW, Lean Startup Conference, LeadDev Conference, among many others. Public speaking allows you to distill your knowledge into something that is accessible to others, become a part of the greater community, and mentor and inspire others in the community. We also provide assistance for travel. For example, one of our engineers, Anna, is on the board of RailsBridge and runs ElixirBridge, and we fly her around the country to do Elixir workshops on the weekends.

To many team members at Carbon Five, speaking at conferences is important on a personal level. Courtney, who supports a variety of initiatives like Railsbridge, Women Who Code, and Balanced Team, says, “I think seeing women on stage speaking about something that they know showcases that there is a body of work that a diverse set of humans is responsible for. To me, that is the greatest opposing argument to the anti-diversity mindset. Plus, it’s just fun.”

Locally, we also sponsor Meetups, speaker series, and hack nights that are open to the community. Check out our talks and events, you’re always welcome to attend.

We go above and beyond to serve our community.

It’s safe to say we’re all bonded by the drive to create a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive community. Not only is this crucial for the platform we’re building, but it’s also important to us as individuals. We look for any opportunity to connect with the moms (and parents) we aspire to help and the companies that are excited about hiring them. In pre-pandemic times, we would host networking events for moms, and are looking forward to connecting again in-person when it’s safe to do so. Our online forums are also a great place for moms, parents, and allies to meet and support one another.

We’re also dedicated to empowering and serving women of color with our non-profit, RISE. In addition to providing scholarships for upskilling certifications, we help over 10,000 women of color with job placements by harnessing the power of community and support systems. The RISE program hosts community events, provides professional support for optimizing resumes and LinkedIn profiles, interview prep, and much more. We dedicate a percentage of all of our clients revenue to RISE.

Another way we engage with our community is through RALLY, a program that’s designed to give moms a space to connect for 1-on-1 advice on topics like resume writing or how to enter a certain field. Our RALLY session guides help maximize these sessions.

While engineers might not interact with clients on a day-to-day basis, being able to empathize and understand their pain points it’s crucial for helping us build the best product possible.

We belong to the communities we serve.

All of us are impacted by the decisions that influence how we navigate our communities. This helps us empathize as we think about how changes made in our product will affect those around us. To build the best product we can, we engage with our community to broaden our understanding of the needs of its members. This could include hosting regional workshops to connect our transit planning community to each other, starting initiatives like Womxn in Urbanism to provide space to highlight the non-dominant voices in urbanism, or simply giving back to the community through programs like the Percent Pledge. Participating in our communities is a critical part of how we stay excited and accountable for building great products.

We are proud to be based in Oakland and be a part of the community here.

The business landscape in Oakland is much smaller than it is in San Francisco and in the rest of Silicon Valley, and we like being a part of it. Oakland as a city is community-driven and grassroots. We embrace the diversity that exists in Oakland. We aim to leave our mark on the city through mentorship, creating jobs, and donations to local grassroots organizations.

We partner with Code Nation for annual summer internship programs. Code Nation equips students in under-resourced schools with the fundamental coding skills and professional experiences that together create access to careers in technology. We highly recommend other companies participate!

We empower our employees to come up with creative opportunities for diversity initiatives and community events to promote growth and education for all individuals by making resources available and inviting the community to participate. We offer gift matching, and encourage employees to use time to contribute to the non-profits they feel most passionately about.

LaunchDarkly also joined Pledge 1%, a global movement to create a new normal for companies of all sizes and stages to have a positive social impact through their business. We are pledging 1% of revenue to charitable causes and have partnered with local Oakland nonprofits that address homelessness and poverty.

We strive to live up to our company values of being kind, smart, and creative in how we operate as a business.

This past year, we donated over $9 million dollars in Snapchat advertising to nonprofits, and $4.5 million to organizations focused on equitable access to education and exposure to career pathways for underserved youth around the world. We are helping to transform future pathways into tech for underrepresented talent, providing half of the funding for the Catalyze Tech coalition’s $20 million investment to increase the number of CS teachers across America. We devoted 6,870+ volunteer hours to Snap Philanthropy projects, and created opportunities for historically underrepresented groups through our Snap Academies and Yellow Accelerator mentorship programs.

Snap engineers and product managers are leading inclusive product initiatives like our inclusive camera lens, and the ASL Alphabet Lens, created by “The Deafengers” (a group of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing team members) and SignAll, which recognizes and translates ASL to help Snapchatters sign their name and learn the ASL alphabet. Our teams continue to leverage AR to build empathy and tell stories of underrepresented communities, adding our AR lens to LACMA exhibit Black American Portraits, enriching the visitor experience with context and storytelling.

See our full impact in our annual Citizen Snap Report.