Engineering-driven tech companies

We embrace engineering from the top to the bottom.

Many companies claim to be engineering-driven, but few actually are. After much internal discussion, we agreed that the most salient attributes of Wealthfront’s culture exemplify how engineering-driven we are. It’s apparent in everything we do:

1. All decisions are made based on objective criteria. Engineers represent more than half our employees, and leadership empowers engineers to drive decisions and lead the culture for the entire company. That being said, this doesn’t mean tyrannical rule. Engineers at Wealthfront ensure the other functions feel empowered to contribute equally, encourage debate, and rely on data-driven standards for decision-making.
2. We organize teams to maximize performance. We believe the team owns the code, not individuals. To that end, scrum teams internally organize to deliver projects.
3. If it can be automated, we do it. We are dedicated to automating as much as possible, whether it’s software development or client-facing features. A main part of our mission is to eliminate the frustrating manual processes that plague traditional financial service companies and leads to increased client costs and fees. That’s why we are so invested in continuous deployment (see our Continuous Delivery section below in our profile!) and automated test infrastructure from server to mobile.

Engineers have the right resources and tooling to ship code every day.

Founded by engineers, Qualia’s priority has always been to develop truly great products. We’ve fostered a culture of high autonomy and alignment, enabling our engineering team to lead innovation and build products from the ground up.

To ensure our engineers have what they need to move fast and ship high-quality code, we also have powerful internal libraries and tooling to help our team explore options and solve problems quickly. For example, one of the many tools used by our team, Reval, (which lets you see front-end changes in real time as you make changes to code), was built by one of our co-founders, Lucas Hansen.

While the team has evolved over time, maintaining our core values has remained our top priority – even as Qualia has continued raising funds (our Series D in late 2020), growing well beyond a $1B valuation. Our engineering team still sits center-stage, and we provide the tools and support needed in order for them to drive product development and guide roadmap.

We’re building secure, robust, and scalable infrastructure while rapidly delivering features.

Our CTO, Kenan, has spent his entire career building early stage startups from the ground up. He has a strong focus on building infrastructure to scale and support an amazing user experience without compromising on security and speed. Kenan now brings this expertise to Point. As we build our engineering team, we’re committed to leveraging newer technologies to rapidly iterate and scale while solving complex problems. This gives us a competitive advantage over incumbents, since traditional financial services companies are known to run on mainframes and take many months and millions of dollars to build a single feature. For example, Wells Fargo spent $500M to develop their mobile app, while we have been able to build similar functionality in a third of the time for less than 1 percent of the cost.

When we think about solving problems, we consider more than just the technical implications of the implementation. We think deeply about how engineering can make the product deliver the best user experience by designing best in class APIs to correspond to our UX design. While there are certainly confines in which we need to operate, our team finds clever solutions to build around potential bottlenecks. Since we are in the financial services space, it’s very important for us to also maintain high availability and reliability. We are methodical in our approach to choosing the technology we want to leverage when we need to make major changes to the infrastructure.

In order to focus on our core competencies, we are deliberate about future proofing our technology throughout each iteration. For example, we leverage GraphQL as it enables us to create APIs at a much faster pace, has a self-documented API, is supported by large organizations who require reliability, enables us to test out the API in a “Playground” without having to set up a client, and allows for extensibility as we build out more functionality. These are the kinds of considerations we take into account when deciding which technology to adopt. We also evaluate the feasibility of maintaining the infrastructure with the small and nimble team we currently have.

Grouparoo is building data tools made by and for engineers.

We spend a lot of time thinking about things like the UX of CLI interfaces, how to install and distribute software, and how painful upgrading to the next version might be. Building our roadmap is a collaborative exercise between all members of the company and our users – who are mostly other engineers.

We have early customers who help us drive our roadmap at all levels from issues to feature requests. For example, they let us know which connections they need and give us feedback about our deployment strategies. In the future, we'll allow users to upvote and react to issues as a way to inform our decision-making.

At its core, our company is engineering-driven.

Both of our founders come from technical backgrounds: Matt has a software/hardware background and Will has a hardware/mechanical engineering background. We approach biotech by asking ourselves, “How can software or hardware make this way better?” We build our reactors from the ground up. We’ve designed the entire system in-house. We write all of the software and build all of the hardware. In doing so, we’re revolutionizing the way biotech is done through an engineering perspective.

Because engineers here have a ton of power, autonomy, and responsibility, we also try to instill a culture of service and helping others. Case in point: Our recurring meeting with the bio team is called, “What Can Software Do For You?”. We view it as a privilege and an obligation to be able to make other team members’ lives easier. The same is true for our customers: one of our main goals is to allow our customers to spend less time in the lab and more time in their living rooms, saving them time, money, and resources.

When you join the team, you can expect to spend roughly 50% of your time on planned work that’s on our roadmap (and that we share with our exec team), 30% for the grab bag of things we want to pursue (putting our own ideas toward company and team goals) or requests from customers, and 20% for tech debt and bug fixes (we care a lot about our own dev flow and improving that over time.)

We’re truly people over process – there’s no scrum masters here (though we’d welcome you if you are one). We believe in building a process that works for engineers and one that helps us be productive, not one that acts as a mechanism for control or replaces the trust between management and engineers.

First and foremost, we are an engineering company. Engineers are the ambassadors of our company and community.

Engineers at Automattic power our culture, and drive a variety of codebases and processes devoted to making the web a better place. WordPress websites power over 40% of the websites on the internet and see over 162M unique visitors per month in the US alone; that’s a lot of opportunity to make an impact.

Distributed around the world and with varied backgrounds, interests, and expertise, our engineers are ambassadors of our company and community. They collaborate with the other roles at Automattic to define, implement, and improve the experience for our passionate and loyal customers.

We’re Growing!

WordPress is growing rapidly, and so is Automattic. Matt Mullenweg created the company in 2005, two years after co-founding the open source project WordPress. Since then, both Automattic and WordPress have expanded massively and consistently. WordPress is by far the largest CMS on the web, powering ten times as many websites as the second-largest platform. And our growth is accelerating, as our mission is now more important than ever before:

• We enable anyone with a story to tell it, from bloggers to small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises.
• We don’t make our users sacrifice their privacy for power.
• We provide design and code that users can freely share and modify.
• We’re committed to humanity, decency, and transparency.

If you’re comfortable with (and enjoy) autonomy … if you want your work to have a tremendous and positive impact on the web … if you believe doing good and earning a living are compatible activities, we’d love to have you join us! Apply today.