Engineering teams with a fast-paced environment

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. We raised a $25M Series A in July 2022 (at a $200M valuation) and that same year we were also named one of Y Combinator’s Top Private Companies. In 2023, we plan to scale our existing product globally and double in size!

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.

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

It’s an exciting time to join Lumafield as we emerged from stealth mode in April 2022 and are growing rapidly. 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. One of our core values is speed – we believe it’s our greatest advantage and aim to ship products faster for less money than anyone else would dare attempt.

We recently raised a $35M Series B, which will help transform the way engineers and designers work on everything from cosmetics packaging to bike parts. In the next year we plan to double our engineering team. If you’re excited about joining a fast-moving team, we’d love to hear from you!

The key to our success is scale.

We’re in a highly competitive industry that is evolving fast. Trucking is impacted by many external factors such as changes in oil prices and other geopolitical events. As a result, it’s crucial that we remain nimble and respond to issues beyond our control while still providing and improving our mission critical product.

Our first-mover advantage gives us an edge and we plan to continue innovating at a very high level. This means scaling quickly and effectively. Our engineers are focused on iterating at a rapid pace to see what works and what doesn’t. We often use A/B testing to ensure our customers are getting the best experience. Instead of slow release cycles, we want engineers to take calculated risks and we value speed over perfection.

Thanks to our rapid growth curve, the size of the engineering team and lines of code have also grown at a swift pace. Increased product use pushed the infrastructure and standard operating procedure around deployment to its limits. During this period of uncertainty, which has now passed, deciding when and what to deploy became a calculated risk. As the team focused on minimizing the impact to all of our users, engineers were encouraged to dig into what could potentially be the root cause and assess potential risks. If we determined that risk was low enough, we would then deploy with caution. Now, the team confidently handles our growth and is able to assess risks to continue providing an excellent user experience.

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.

While the company has grown in size, our engineering team has stayed relatively lean and flat, so we plan our teams and projects around where we can have the highest impact.

The importance of digital engagement for B2B companies has grown significantly in recent years and accelerated with the recent dramatic shift to remote work. These tailwinds, our market-leading product, and the strengths of our team all put us in a strong position to take the lead in an expanding multi-billion dollar market. While many companies slowed their hiring in 2022, we continued to grow to meet market demands, expanding our team from ~70 to ~180 employees.

On the engineering side, projects can range from one to three to six months, and we assign teams based on project needs and expertise. This means new engineers on the team can expect to work with different folks and gain exposure to a wide range of interesting, unique problems. We’re not afraid to pivot as needed to build products that best serve our customers’ needs. For example, we launched Signals, which uses an AI predictive model to give sales reps better insights into which accounts are sales-ready or just starting their research. Aggregating data and presenting customers with dynamic graphs showing account trends and clear activity timelines enables them to better maximize their sales pipelines.

There are ample opportunities for engineers of all stripes to take on exciting challenges like expanding the Pipeline Cloud – a revolutionary new set of technologies and processes designed to help modern revenue teams drive pipeline, faster. If this excites you in any way, we encourage you to reach out!

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.

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!

We balance speed and perfection.

Employee leave is a highly regulated space that’s constantly evolving. In addition to a growing push for federal paid family leave, several states (e.g. Massachusetts and Colorado) have released their own paid leave programs, while others have constructed mandates around specific leave types (e.g. organ donation in California). What’s more, with COVID-19 creating a more distributed workforce, companies are increasingly dealing with the complexities of managing employee leave in accordance with multiple state and local laws. We aren’t afraid to change strategies quickly as needed to keep up with market shifts and provide the best user experience. For instance, while we discussed expanding to cover international leaves, we realized that launching caregiver leave should take priority in order to better serve our existing users in their times of need.

As a fast-moving startup in this space, we place a strong emphasis on correctness, since the code we ship immediately impacts users’ daily lives. In just one year, we’ve gone from deploying 3-5 times a week to 40-50 by automating our deploy pipeline. We’ll cut scope and iterate as needed to get features to customers quickly without sacrificing quality.

If joining a rapidly growing, mission-driven startup resonates with you, we’re hiring!