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!

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.

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.

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’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 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 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.

Visit the website of our social impact program LaunchDarkly.org to find out how we’re making meaningful contributions to some of our world’s most pressing social issues. And if any of the above sparks your curiosity, don’t hesitate to check out our open roles and get in touch!

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.