Engineering teams with a fast-paced environment on Key Values

Stytch

APIs for passwordless authentication

Remote (US)
We have a bias for action.

Authentication is often a frustrating experience for both developers and users. When it comes to the traditional approach, passwords, 65% of users reuse the same one across different accounts. This poses a significant security risk and can create larger breach liabilities. At the same time, people often forget passwords and have to reset them. It can be such a headache that it prevents users from completing an online transaction, costing businesses money and users. While working together at Plaid, co-founders Julianna and Reed realized there had to be a better way to solve this problem. Thus, Stytch was born, with the mission of transforming the space by building a developer platform for passwordless authentication.

We’re growing quickly and believe in learning by iterating and taking bold, but calculated risks. In order to prioritize decisions we ask ourselves, “How impactful is it, and is it reversible?” If it’s something that’s highly reversible, we’ll go for it. If it’s highly impactful and not reversible, we’ll seek out key stakeholders to weigh in.

Last but not least, we do a tiling exercise at the beginning of each quarter to figure out how we can break down our big projects into smaller chunks. Since we send out a change log to our customers every week, this helps keep us accountable and ensures we’re moving as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Read full profile
12 Open Positions
Leapfin

Automated finance operations

San Mateo or Remote (Global)
We have a bias for action, even if it means making mistakes along the way.

At Leapfin, we deploy daily, work in 1-2 week sprint cycles, and have a high sense of urgency. Decisions to act are always better than indecisions. Sometimes engineers who come from big companies are fearful of making decisions themselves because they’re so used to asking for approval. It’s the opposite here. When you come on board, it’s because we hired you for a reason and trust your expertise, and our expectation is that you take ownership over everything you work on. There’s no red tape to jump through (other than budget approval), so we all get things done fast. While this fast-paced environment inevitably means you’ll make some mistakes along the way, we view them as team mistakes, and always learn from them.

Read full profile
7 Open Positions
Gordian

Building APIs for the air travel industry

Bellevue, WA or Remote (North and South America)
Impact is our guiding star in our dynamic environment, which is why it’s one of our company’s core values.

In our fast-paced environment, it can be easy to get distracted. So, we center our efforts ruthlessly around opportunities for the largest impact. We define impact in specific measurable accomplishments that increase our probability of becoming a critical part of the travel data infrastructure so we can improve the traveling experience for everyone.

While most companies prioritize through two-week sprints, we find that cadence is too slow. We don’t have time for pretty presentations or lengthy planning sessions. Instead, we set our major goals every month, and adjust our milestones every three days (what we call our Plans), where we update everyone on our progress and pivots. This rhythm leaves us as much time as possible to speed through projects.

Ultimately, focusing on impact is how we build momentum. Every customer win unlocks multiple new opportunities to create more value. We are taking advantage of this effect and growing our business exponentially. We make the best use of scarce time and every moment seized or lost has substantial effect.

Our motivation to excel, combined with the compelling opportunities in front of us means we need great people to join the team.

Read full profile
9 Open Positions
The Mom Project

Career platform focused on DE&I

Remote (US)
We’re working to create a billion dollars worth of economic opportunity for moms.

We have ambitious goals and it’ll take agility, flexibility, dedication, and hard work to reach them. While it has always been hard for new moms to reenter the workforce, the COVID-19 pandemic forced women to leave the workforce at a drastic rate. In 2020 alone, women globally lost more than 64 million jobs, costing them at least $800 billion in earnings. We’re working with a sense of urgency to dramatically change this landscape and rewrite the narrative. This means that we’re not afraid to rapidly iterate on our product and shift directions based on our learnings. While we work in quarterly planning cycles, we’ll adjust the roadmap whenever it makes sense and we find it adds more value to the business.

Read full profile
13 Open Positions
PointCard

The debit card with rewards and benefits

San Francisco, New York City, or Remote (US)
Things move fast around here, and that’s just the nature of the game.

Large banking and card institutions like Chase and American Express are slow-moving, which gives us an advantage as a nimbler, focused team to iterate and ship new products much faster. For example, while debit cards typically take 12 months to go live, we can do it in 3.5 months. Our agility as a small startup allows us to push code to production several times a day and make decisions without bureaucracy and red tape. In September 2021, we announced a $46.5M Series B, which allowed us to invest in our engineering team and technology stack and grow our user base much more rapidly.

Read full profile
3 Open Positions
Mode

Data analytics platform

Remote (US)
We are in an exciting and fast-paced market and love to ship.

Data is in demand right now. In this high-growth market, we like to make decisions fast and learn along the way. As a result, we've created a fast-moving team that thinks about how to reduce time on feedback loops and delivery.

To that end, our deployment pipeline moves quickly. We practice continuous deployment to our pre-production environment, work according to agile development principles, and promote the latest stable code to production at least once a day. To decouple deploys from releases, we make heavy use of feature flags.

That said, a fast-paced environment doesn’t require burnout. On the contrary, we can only ship as fast as we need to with a well-rested, energetic, and happy team. Mode’s leadership team sees value in people maintaining their lives and interests beyond the office.

Read full profile
105 Open Positions
Let's Do This

Marketplace for endurance events

San Francisco, CA and London, UK
Speed is our greatest weapon.

We will always prioritize time-to-market and always challenge ourselves to execute faster. While it’s common to hear that you will release code on your first day, we really mean it. Engineers on our team release to production multiple times per day and we tend to work on multiple projects within a single sprint. Sure, there's work that may take a whole sprint to complete, but we’re typically multi-tasking and keeping multiple plates spinning. Not only do we have many workstreams, but we’re also keen on not siloing anyone on a single project. To help stay focused, we regularly use single-week sprints as well.

At present, everyone on our team is a full-stack developer. While most people have front- or back-end preferences and different strengths, we encourage everyone to work across the entire stack.

We’re a small team, so we can quickly change focus and get behind a new problem on short notice and deliver in quick order. Our process supports a maker’s schedule, which we honor every day. To help facilitate speed, we also use CI/CD and have designed our technical infrastructure to bias toward frequent and fast deployments.

Read full profile
1 Open Positions
- Interested in joining?
Local Kitchens

Micro food hall

San Francisco, CA
We’re on a quest to build 2,000 stores.

At Local Kitchens, we’re helping local restaurants expand to new cities thanks to our network of micro food halls and we’re elevating fast food selection for families in suburban communities. We’re starting from a world-class guest experience and working backwards from there. Since building in the physical world is traditionally slow – and guests’ expectations are constantly increasing – speed is our most controllable advantage in leading the market. Therefore, we have a bias for action – we beg for forgiveness instead of asking permission! We often put in long hours in pursuit of improving the guest experience, because that's our biggest differentiator.

In just one year, we’ve built web ordering, an in-store kiosk, a mobile app, a Kitchen Display System, and a fleet of third-party integrations and software amounting to our KitchenOS. We’ve done all this with a small team of four, deploying to production many times per day. In order to move fast, we believe in empowering engineers with decision-making autonomy in their domain. It’s an exciting time to join the team. We closed a $25M Series A in 2021, ramped to $10 million in sales within one year, and are planning to build 2,000 stores by 2030.

Read full profile
3 Open Positions
Instacart

Groceries delivered from local stores

San Francisco,Toronto, Chicago, New York or Remote (US/Canada)
Our business has dramatically transformed these last few years.

As shelter in place orders rolled out across North America in 2020, Instacart became an essential service and lifeline for consumers across the U.S. and Canada overnight. As expected, we sprung into action to maintain our systems to keep up with demand. Today, our business has a new resting heart rate that's 4x where we were at the start of 2020 thanks to the fast thinking and adaptability of our technical teams.

Grocery is one of the most logistically complicated industries out there, while retail as a whole is changing at a fast clip. We succeed because we’re constantly building, iterating, and testing.

Read full profile
51 Open Positions
Amplitude

Product intelligence and analytics platform

San Francisco, CA
We work with a sense of urgency, but without the unnecessary stress.

Generally speaking – across all of the different pillars and teams at Amplitude – we try not to tie ourselves to arbitrary deadlines. Instead, we build, continuously release, gather feedback early and often, pivot when needed, and retire work when it’s stable. When we’re getting close to a deadline, we’re not afraid to push it back. While we are in favor of building quickly, we don’t want it to be stupidly quick!

In 2019, our team started tracking a company-wide metric: number of features shipped. We got pushback from various teams, created a working group, and two weeks later pushed out a new iteration of that metric: number of bets taken. Not only is this an accurate demonstration of how quickly we iterate, but it also captures our mentality and how we orient ourselves at Amplitude. It encourages us to create learning opportunities as quickly and as often as possible, and removes any expectation to ship things perfectly the first time around.

Read full profile
30 Open Positions
Brex

Financial services for companies

Remote (US, Canada, Brazil, or Israel)
Brex was founded in 2017, and in four years, grew into a company spanning four countries with over 1,000 employees.

During this time, we’ve grown from being a single corporate credit card product for startups to providing fully fledged card and cash management products with robust spend management features to customers across multiple industries. Many of our core financial products are complex and require time to get right, but that doesn’t stop us from moving fast.

Even as a (much) larger organization, we continue to innovate and innovate quickly. One of the best examples is Brexploration, a program that allows existing team members to devote an entire quarter to building a loved product as “founders.” Teams apply to the program and then spend three months working like early entrepreneurs and skipping existing company processes. Successful projects are then transitioned back to operating like a scaling product. Many of our most customer-loved products and features came from Brexploration, like Expense Management and Bill Pay.

Engineering at Brex also focuses on enabling Product Teams to execute as quickly as possible. Our Infrastructure Empowerment team, for instance, builds our infrastructure on top of cutting-edge technologies, tools, and best practices (Kubernetes, GitOps, Istio, etc.). We have adopted a microservices-oriented architecture, and are continuously releasing new software which enables fast iteration of our product.

Read full profile
39 Open Positions
Lumafield

Advanced X-ray imaging and inspection technology

Cambridge, MA and San Francisco, CA
We’re planning to double our engineering team in the next year.

It’s an exciting time to join Lumafield as we’ve just launched. Our agility as a small startup allows us to ship quickly and make decisions without a ton of bureaucracy or red tape. Engineers are empowered to propose new ideas, drive projects, and make decisions to move things forward. While it’s safe to say there’s a high sense of urgency, it’s not frantic. We love to ship early and often, then iterate as needed. In fact, we regularly give kudos at our weekly all-hands meeting, and a recent theme has been “Go Fast Kudos.”

In the next year we plan to double our engineering team from ~15 to ~30. If you’re excited about joining a fast-moving team, we’d love to hear from you!

Read full profile
7 Open Positions
CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform

Distributed across the US, Canada, Ireland, UK, Germany, Japan
We’ve grown from 120 employees in early 2018, to roughly 470 in early 2021, and are continuing to add new members.

As a result, we’ve created fast-moving teams with a high degree of information flow that innovate around how to reduce time on feedback loops and delivery. Our development process focuses on a very short cycle where small changes are iterated on incrementally and delivered quickly. There’s very low lead time to make changes and we follow a dual-track agile development process, where experimentation and discovery are equally important.

We build, continuously release, gather feedback early and often, and aren’t afraid to course correct when needed. While there’s a high rate of change (from a DevOps culture sense), a fast-paced environment doesn’t require burnout. As Lena Reinhard, our VP of Product Engineering, puts it: we avoid burnout by keeping the bigger picture in mind and focusing on clear communication, expectations, and trust.

In 2020, we had 100% YoY credit growth and raised $215.5M in venture capital, and we have no intention of slowing down. Not only will we grow in number (we doubled our product and engineering organization in 2020 compared to 2019), but we’ll also accelerate our productivity. We shipped 100+ features and bug fixes last year (compared to 40 the year before) and we hope you’ll help us set a new record this year.

Read full profile
8 Open Positions
Plus

Productivity tool to capture and share business data from any source

Remote (US time zones)
We have a bias for speed over perfection.

Our biggest advantage is having a small, nimble team that can quickly respond to customer feedback, turn ideas into features, and execute on building an amazing product. We’d rather release a smaller iteration sooner, because we’ll learn more as a team about how to proceed.

As an engineering team, we break up our tasks and push up work early and often to maintain momentum. We'd rather see iterative in-progress pieces that may be messy, than no work at all. We try to not let individual PRs become too large, so that team members can review our work in a reasonable amount of time. Similarly, we aim to keep base components smaller so we can build on them for more complex functionality.

Read full profile
2 Open Positions
- Senior Software Engineer (Frontend or Fullstack)
- Staff Software Engineer (Backend)
Universe

Build an awesome website from your iPhone

Brooklyn, NY or Remote
We know that the only way to approach perfection is to ship early and often.

One of our core values is kaizen, which is a Japanese term meaning ‘continuous improvement.’ We believe in iterative progress over sweeping action and/or big central plans. To that end, in 2020, we shipped 48 iOS releases. And if/when it works, we improve on it. Each release is a building block toward the next evolution of our product.

At the beginning, we sat down every week and decided what to work on. We’re a bit more sophisticated now – we loosely plan a few weeks out, and then we take on important foundational projects that require more than a week to complete. But ultimately we still aim for weekly cycles, aiming to ship a release every week that may be staggered with larger projects, and still focusing on minimum implementations to test ideas before we invest heavily.

Our commerce tools are a perfect example of this – to begin, we broke it down into the smallest pieces possible. Bite size, easily digestible pieces. The first piece was so small, you couldn’t yet withdraw the money you made to your bank account. But, more importantly, making money on your site became incredibly easy. Then, we added bank integrations, inventory management, product variants, mailing addresses, shipping labels, order management, automatic digital product delivery, and most recently, dispute management. We shipped each of these one at a time, many with at least one follow up iteration to incorporate immediate learnings from creators.

Beyond our product roadmap, we give our engineers open-ended time and space – every fourth week here is a polish week, where engineers get to work on things they choose. After working on a feature for several weeks, engineers know best which corners got cut or where they would have liked to have spent more time on that might not have been critical at the time. A polish week is a chance to focus more engineering time where engineers know it’s needed. We fix bugs and pay down technical debt, but we also use this time to get more involved with other parts of the company, like product, design, and marketing.

We have a really big vision – to democratize the web. While it’s important to keep that in mind, we know that the only way to get there is week-by-week, day-by-day. We don’t have six-month product roadmaps. Instead, we learn quickly and leverage those learnings to figure out the best way to accomplish our goals.

This kind of work environment isn’t for everyone, but it is for people who love to move fast, learn a lot, and make incremental progress towards perfection.

Read full profile
5 Open Positions
Range

Team-coordination software for high-performance cultures

San Francisco, CA or Remote
Things change quickly, and everything is balancing trade-offs.

As an early stage startup, we need to be able to adapt and switch courses quickly. Our philosophy is best described by this Eisenhower quote: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” We value the process of planning, but don’t consider any of our plans to be carved in stone. We don't want chaos and disorder, but we also don't want to be rigid and inflexible. Striking this balance is something we actively and consciously work toward every day.

One of the biggest frustrations people have about working at early stage startups is how often things change. People need consistency and certainty, and change creates anxiety and fear, which, in turn, are shown to decrease productivity and creativity. So how do we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory facts?

The answer is that not all change is created equal. It’d be absurd if you needed four levels of approval to change what snacks you have in your office kitchen. Conversely, it’s going to be really jarring if you are suddenly told to drop all your work because a product line has been axed, without any explanation or foreshadowing.

The trick is to allow for some types of changes to be fast and fluid, while requiring others to be slower and more deliberate. Some changes should require nothing more than a quick chat, while others need a stakeholder meeting, and others need an all-hands company meeting. We make sure team members are informed and involved in decision making, which means we can tune plans dynamically and quickly without people feeling like they are being jerked back and forth. Dan, our CEO, goes into detail about how we approach change at Range in his post, Shades of Change.

Read full profile
3 Open Positions
AngelList Venture

Platform for startup investing

San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, or Remote
We’re an action-oriented company of builders who enjoy rapidly iterating on new and existing ideas.

While venture capital typically moves at a snail’s pace, we’re the opposite. Our organization is composed of nimble, high-context teams that can operate autonomously without process getting in the way. We focus on what’s important and sweat the precise details that matter. This allows us to consistently ideate, validate, and execute on new concepts at a rapid pace.

Intrinsic drive, love of results, and a strong sense of founder mentality are traits commonly shared across the team. Nothing feels better than solving a customer’s (internal or external) problem within minutes of it being reported. We have a Slack channel called #v-product-feedback where people across the company post everything from bugs to copy suggestions, product improvement ideas, tooling improvement ideas, and more. Normally these get funneled into our product backlog, but sometimes engineers will jump in, take a suggestion, and drive a solution within the same day (or hour!) of it being posted. Talk about speedy!

Read full profile
10 Open Positions
Classy

Online fundraising platform for nonprofits

San Diego, CA or Remote (US)
What started as a small fundraiser for cancer research has now raised over $3 billion for social and environmental causes – and we’re not stopping there.

We’re constantly innovating for our customers and making improvements as often as possible. To do so effectively, we use agile methodology with two-week sprints. We hold three scrum ceremonies every sprint to address tickets in our backlog, discuss what went well and what we can improve on from the previous sprint, and plan our next sprint. You can hear more about a day in the life of Classy engineers here. We’re growing quickly and just raised a $118M Series D, which means we’re hiring accordingly!

Read full profile
16 Open Positions
Want to List Your Company?

Submit a team profile!
- Select 8 Values
- Contact me (Lynne 👋)
- Qualify Your Values
- Reach Thousands of Devs
- Find Value-Aligned Candidates
- Have Meaningful Initial Conversations
- Don't Fill Roles, Hire Teammates
- Celebrate
You can post as many job openings as you want.
- Get started

Engineering teams with a fast-paced environment

We have a bias for action.

We have a bias for action, even if it means making mistakes along the way.

Impact is our guiding star in our dynamic environment, which is why it’s one of our company’s core values.

We’re working to create a billion dollars worth of economic opportunity for moms.

Things move fast around here, and that’s just the nature of the game.

We are in an exciting and fast-paced market and love to ship.

Speed is our greatest weapon.

We’re on a quest to build 2,000 stores.

Our business has dramatically transformed these last few years.

We work with a sense of urgency, but without the unnecessary stress.

Brex was founded in 2017, and in four years, grew into a company spanning four countries with over 1,000 employees.

We’re planning to double our engineering team in the next year.

We’ve grown from 120 employees in early 2018, to roughly 470 in early 2021, and are continuing to add new members.

We have a bias for speed over perfection.

We know that the only way to approach perfection is to ship early and often.

Things change quickly, and everything is balancing trade-offs.

We’re an action-oriented company of builders who enjoy rapidly iterating on new and existing ideas.

What started as a small fundraiser for cancer research has now raised over $3 billion for social and environmental causes – and we’re not stopping there.

Sign up for Key Values' weekly newsletter!