The biggest draw to working at any organization is you feeling a connection with the people you’re working with. It’s just human nature.

People are internally, intrinsically motivated. You want to feel like you’re on a team all working towards a common goal and that you don’t want to let your teammates down. There an incredible sense of camaraderie at BuildZoom and we want to continue bringing on people who inspire us and can draw inspiration from us. On paper, our team members are incredibly impressive. Collectively, we have graduates from Ivy League and top 20 schools, MBAs from the best business schools, and years of experience working at large corporations, investment firms, and successful startups. Our expertise is recognized externally as well. For instance, Issi Romem (who we call our Economist in Residence) is frequently quoted and referenced by major publications like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Aside from everyone having a high degree of cognitive ability, we are also a very emotionally intelligent group of people. We put a lot of emphasis on good communication and building relationships, both of which are musts for our future hires. You can read a little more about who we are or if you’d like to meet us, let us know.

Our team members have founded non-profits, written novels, and amassed decades of combined coding experience.

We’ve toured the country playing music, performed SOC and ISO audits, and run professionally. We are a team of pet (and human) parents, entrepreneurs, and amateur bread bakers. While we’re proud of our collective personal and professional accomplishments, we believe what makes us most impressive is how each member of our team embodies Aptible’s company values.

We take our values seriously and are constantly blown away by the degree to which our team lives by them. As one of many examples, we measure commitments through company-wide OKRs that are then translated into OKRs at the team level. Those team level OKRs are then divided into weekly/sprint level goals. We hold each other accountable by having daily syncs, and as part of the larger Aptible organization, during our weekly all-hands meetings where we discuss how each team and the company are tracking towards our goals.

Everyone at Aptible loves the mutual support and camaraderie of a strong team that wins together. We measure our commitments carefully and hold each other accountable, which means we’re able to deliver more to our colleagues and customers in the long run. We fail often and early, and learn from it. We value and respect teaching as the best way to learn, and make time to share information openly. We think and talk a lot about how we can improve, and work hard at it. We ask “why?” a lot in order to understand root causes.

Employees tend to hide their side projects and entrepreneurial aspirations from their employer. Not at Brex.

A sizable portion of Brex’s employees are former founders and seasoned executives. We are incredibly proud to attract and support individuals who have ambitions beyond “just having a job.” No matter what your future career goals are, we do our best to support you in developing the skills you want and giving you the opportunities you need to progress.

Not only have many of our current team members started companies in the past, but many go on to start companies together after their time at Brex. Your colleagues are YC alums, experienced fintech executives, and future founders – this may very well be where you find your co-founders.

Last, but certainly not least, we are most impressed by the diversity amongst our colleagues. We believe the best people come from all backgrounds and locations. We are a remote-first company that hires across time zones and countries (Canada, USA, Brazil currently) making sure we optimize for skill and talent instead of location. A huge percentage of the company (including our founders!) is working in a country they didn’t grow up in! As a result, we put a strong emphasis on immigration support.

There is no shortage of people to learn from at Nova.

We are only as great as the sum of our parts and believe that every individual at Nova makes a meaningful contribution in knowledge, expertise, skill, personality, and/or perspective. We go above and beyond to find talent from diverse places. At Nova, you'll find people coming from not only top schools but also non-traditional backgrounds.

We’re on a mission to help immigrants gain representation in the financial sector, and no one understands the problem better than our founders. Loek, Misha (CEO), and Nicky (COO) met and started Nova while they were at Stanford. As immigrants themselves, they were excluded from the financial system in the U.S., which made it incredibly hard to do things like build credit and sign a lease. For all of us, working at Nova is more than a job – we believe in the mission, and many of us have also felt firsthand the pain points we are working to solve. As one example, Damira shares her story as a former lawyer and refugee, and why she’s at Nova.

Since Nova’s founding, we have assembled an amazing team of investors and advisors. Current and former coworkers have brought experiences from Adobe, Affirm, Bain, Carta, Credit Karma, Docker, Dropbox, Goldman Sachs, Google Ventures, Kiva, McKinsey, Zenefits, and more.

As a Novan, you’ll be able to advance your career by connecting with experts through our community of industry leaders and investors, including Y Combinator, First Round, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Canapi Ventures, Sound Ventures, NYCA Partners, Moderne Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, CFSI, and SVAngel.

NerdWallet engineers have both the depth and breadth necessary to develop complex technical solutions in their own domain while understanding the broader context into which those solutions fit.

Pragmatism is highly valued in our engineering org. For instance, knowing when to build versus buy. We research and think carefully about when to use libraries, frameworks, and external partners and when to invest our time to build our own. We compare options, knowing that for all non-trivial problems there likely exist multiple solutions, and that not all solutions are created equal. Being pragmatic is key. By utilizing technology that is built and maintained by other people, we can focus on what we do best: building in-house solutions to help our users gain clarity for all of their financial decisions.

While NerdWallet has grown in size, we maintain that we are still “One Engineering Team.” We spent nearly 6 months openly brainstorming, discussing, and collaborating to crystallize our engineering values and culture. This is just one aspect of how we stay unified as we scale.

We are proud to have an open culture of sharing and collaboration. We are constantly learning from one another. Engineers are readily available to help each other in a variety of ways, from our supportive #engineering Slack channel to our platform teams running live support on-call, to lunchtime conversations about an engineer’s latest vim revelation. We have thriving frontend and backend engineering groups with engineers who geek out over things like the finer points of site performance and the differing architectures for a data store. Participation happens at all levels, from our VP of engineering giving a tech talk on the architecture of Pac-Man to our new grads giving presentations to the engineering team about the refactor that they worked on. NerdWallet engineers lift each other up while continually raising the bar for themselves. We believe that we have an obligation to be better tomorrow than we were today.

We’re a group of people who have ambitions across all aspects of our lives.

Other companies like to point to names on their board or executive team who came from prominent, public companies as a sign of the caliber of their workforce. We simply invite people to our offices. The caliber of people at Inntopia is exceptionally high. A recent remote hire, after meeting people in person for the first time, took a few minutes on the following company meeting to say how incredibly impressed he was by the concentration of talent in our ranks. Maybe some of us would be household names if we had sacrificed family and lifestyle in a charge to the top of the ladder, but we didn’t. We believe there are more important things and that allows us to gather incredibly talented individuals who feel the same way.

Every member of our team is impressive - not because of where they’re from or what’s on their resume, but because of what they do and how they impact the team.

We expect to be amazed and inspired by every new person. We know from experience that this can happen in many different ways. However, the end result is always the same - the team feels disproportionately stronger with them on it. This is a big reason for why many of us joined Wove. Much of the team is made up of people who have worked together in the past, had extremely positive experiences doing so, and valued these experiences highly enough to follow each other here. Ten out of the 17 members of our current team know at least one other Wover from beyond the company.

This does not stop at our immediate team. We are similarly impressed by our investors, who are industry veterans with a wealth of experience, and frequently lean on them for guidance. We are a well-funded Series A startup that has raised $12mm.

Our technical bar is high, but our people bar is higher.

We believe diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to building great technology, and we’re assembling the team to prove it. Enigma is made up of former startup founders, interns-turned-employees, academics-turned-engineers, and engineers-turned-data-scientists. Over time, we've learned that the only thing more important than experience is a commitment to finding deeper understanding through data.

Having a unique group of people working together means that learning and collaboration are critical to a healthy and thriving company culture. We have frequent lunchtime learning sessions, weekly company-wide squad presentations to share recently shipped projects, and ongoing thoughtful discussions in our #engineering and #datascience Slack channels. For slightly less thoughtful (but no less interesting!) conversations, there are channels such as #random for discussion on recent news articles, requests for cat sitters, furniture debates, and questions that don’t seem to fit anywhere else (“do you consider stores like WalMart and Target supermarkets?”).

Composed of strategists, designers and engineers, Connected is integrated from the ground up.

United by a single passion—to build better products—we were born to fit the current business climate. Our leadership team helped build the products for once-tiny startups that are now ruling the marketplace. At Connected, we’re using that knowledge to help companies focus on product, move fast, and deliver. Without any VC funding to speak of (we’re self-funded), we’ve grown to be over 150 people in under 4 years (doubling every year). Read more about our CEO Mike Stern and our VP of Engineering Damian McCabe. More bios available here.

Accomplishments aside, we’re proud to work alongside such empathetic team members.

While everyone on our team possesses conventionally impressive traits (i.e. academic, professional, and personal accomplishments), the most impressive attribute we’ve seen shared by everyone at Hatch is their empathy toward each other, and toward the small business owners we work with. The most important qualities we look for at Hatch are whether you possess (1) an insatiable intellectual curiosity and (2) a proclivity to ship products as fast as feasibly possible in service of our customers. If that sounds like you, please get in touch!

Hatch is the product of our CEO, Thomson’s, expertise and unique insights into the industry. He is a data scientist-turned-founder who has already successfully started and sold a company (Framed Data) to Square. During his time at Kleiner Perkins as an EIR, Thomson learned that small businesses owners in the U.S. who were just starting out were still underserved, and started Hatch to understand how to become the lender of first resort.

In order for us to stay small and have large impact, we need impressive people on the team.

To give an example, we can highlight Tony the latest person to the developer team. Tony has worked at a few startups before Peergrade, including another YC company. He has contributed to more than 100 open source projects and authored a book on tmux (The Tao of tmux). We believe more in great ambition than in a great CV, and value intelligent people with ideas. If you are really good at what you are doing, why should you come work at Peergrade? We would love to work with you, learn from what you know and help support you in shaping our product, our culture, our vision and our company. You would get a lot of freedom, we will never bug you down with any bureaucratic tasks and we would focus all of our effort on making you as effective as possible.

Humility is one of our three core values and it provides the foundation for everything else at Amplitude.

One of the best examples of humility comes from our CEO, Spenser. He recently pushed something without involving everyone’s input, and as soon as people spoke up to say that they didn’t feel heard, he fully acknowledged the mistake and worked to reach a consensus that everyone was happy with. For many of us, this set an important precedent to always make sure your peers feel heard and to speak up whenever you don’t feel like you were heard.

When it comes to hiring, we don’t over-index on any particular trait. “Well, except for maybe the ability to self-reflect” if you ask hiring managers like Ryan Kahn. “I’m most impressed by candidates who are introspective and can actually share weaknesses, not just weaknesses poorly disguised as strengths.” While technical skills are important, we also care about kindness, humility, and empathy.

When you join Amplitude, you’ll be exposed to all teams during your first month so that you know exactly how each team is integral to the company’s success. There are many moving parts and having empathy for the various roles in your organization leads to better collaboration and better outcomes.

Last, but certainly not least, we’re proud to work among people who are continually pushing themselves on both a personal and professional level. We have a yearly learning stipend, onsite career coaching, and mental health awareness workshops. There are also in-house coaches to help managers become the best managers possible. We know (from experience…) that people often leave and join jobs not because of the company, but because of managers, so we’re fully invested in getting this as right as possible.

There are so many wonderful people at Amplitude that you’ll be able to meet even if you don’t directly work with them – we have an array of employee resource groups (ERGs) that include everything from Product Queens (for women in product development) to Slow Running (for, well, slow runners) for you to find and connect with them.

We all come from diverse backgrounds and are hustlers.

Our employees all have different work and life experiences. For example, Joy previously worked in advertising, while our other Head of Trainer Development, Crystal, has a background in the education space. That said, we have one important thing in common: we all have a strong passion for life and helping others.

Diversity is paramount to our success as a team, and we hope to continue learning from each teammate's unique life experience as we grow. Our culture is tight-knit and we want the engineering team and any new hires to be part of that. For example, recent events included themed virtual happy hours, Netflix watch parties, and stipends for events by location. Last year, we flew all of our remote employees to NY to join us in HQ for a holiday party at the office. We hope that once the world returns to business as usual we can enjoy future events together as well.

Meet us on our team page!

Work horses, not show horses

Angazans tend to be quietly impressive. You’d never guess that we’ve built deep sea exploration robots, designed the Tesla UI, helped scale Yahoo 14x, developed the Linux kernel, won juried photography competitions, established Grameen’s Kenya operations, or were named to Forbes’ “30 under 30” list.

In fact, typing out that list felt painfully and distinctly non-Angazan, and we’d be just as happy never to do it again. Angazans come from a broad base of backgrounds, but the common theme that binds us is our shared desire to apply our depth of experience towards helping lift people out of poverty. Most Angazans have the ability and privilege to choose from a variety of professional options based on the past efforts we’ve put into our careers, but the only thing you’ll hear us talking about is how we can solve the problems in front of us.

We’re proud of our collective knowledge, and impressed by the humility of our colleagues.

We bring together domain knowledge across multiple fields and are truly innovating at the bleeding edge of technology. You feel honored to be sitting to the person next to you and you’re glad they’re on your team.

Above all, there is a tremendous amount of humility on our team. Everyone is so approachable and happy to sit down with you to explain something or help you debug some code. Even our CEO and co-founder, Peter Chen (who was an instructor at UC Berkeley) enthusiastically hosts Q&As and leads reading groups to promote knowledge sharing. It is wonderful to work with smart people, but a completely different thing when they are the kind of people who are eager and willing to help up-level everyone around then.

The YC founder ecosystem is made up of people from all over the world that are passionate about everything from supersonic jets to fashion.

Working at YC means working with an incredibly smart, knowledgeable, and interesting group of individuals. The ability to learn with and from one another is likely one of the best perks about working at YC. Our partnership has deep expertise starting, growing, and running companies. To name a few, our CEO Michael Seibel was the founder of two YC companies: Justin.tv and Socialcam. Our CFO Kirsty can tell you anything you need to know about financing a company or fundraising. YC’s General Counsel Carolynn invented the SAFE, a convertible investment type that’s become an important part of startup investing. Paul Buchheit is the creator of Gmail. Ali Rowghani, the partner who runs our Continuity fund, was formerly the CFO of Pixar and COO of Twitter. The list goes on. We bring together a diversity of skills and experiences making YC a place where you can find inspiration every day from the people you work with.

Some software engineers at YC are former YC founders, and others have worked at startups before or are interested in starting one of their own one day. All of our current engineers are senior, but we’d gladly hire an engineer early in their career that’s eager to learn and develop their technical and product skills.

We are a small team, but a very experienced one.

We have been lucky to surround ourselves with great individuals. Everyone on our team is exceptionally talented in their respective fields, and this statement extends to our advisors. From an operating perspective, each person has been at small startups and seen success (acquisitions) to building bigger companies.

Our Team:

• Rohit Prakash - Co-founder and CEO and previously co-founder and CEO @ Townsquared, MD/PhD @ Stanford
• Miwa Ikemiya - Co-founder and Chief Design Officer and previously Chief Design Officer @ Townsquared, Researcher @ Microsoft Research
• Russell Taga - Head of engineering and previously engineering director @ Fitbit, COO @ Coin (acquired by Fitbit), VP of engineering @ HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb)
• David Fant - Software engineer and previously co-founder of multiple startups including Just Football (acquired), Apple WWDC Scholar
• Jeremy Shimko - Software engineer and previously founder of Cloudline Media, software engineer @ Reaction Commerce

Our Advisors:

• Mike Sippey - Former VP Product at Twitter
• Scott Cook - Founder of Intuit

Smart and humble.

The Honor team won the award for Best New Startup in 2016 by TechCrunch and our co-founders Seth Sternberg and Sandy Jen have valuable experience in the startup world – they previously founded instant-messaging service Meebo, which Google acquired in 2012.

While a good portion of the engineering team (from the staff to senior level), have degrees from prestigious universities like Stanford and Berkeley, we are equally impressed by teammates who went to bootcamps and are self-taught. We’re conscious of the ratio between senior and junior engineers and want to make sure we hire people who are down-to-earth and well-rounded both professionally and personally.

Our head of engineering has been writing iOS apps for 10 years. Our founder started two companies and raised $9mm by age 23. Our team members were previously at Square, Apple, Reformation, Recurse Center, Spotify, and BMW.

We are a 22-person company with people all over the U.S., and our product has been used by over 400,000 creators and small businesses. We joined Y Combinator in 2018 and have raised $17.2M in financing from Google Ventures, General Catalyst, Javelin Venture Partners, Box Group, and more top investors. If this excites you in any way, you should reach out!

Here’s who we are:

• Joe (founder)
• Ryan (head of engineering)
• Peter (iOS engineer)
• Steve (designer)
• Chris (iOS engineer)
• Adam (growth)
• Coy (backend engineer)
• Hiten (operations)
• Braley (engineering lead)
• Marcus (engineering lead)
• Justin (web engineer)
• Paul (head of strategy and operations)
• Ellen (backend engineer)
• Victor (senior iOS engineer)
• Ian (backend engineer)
• Courtney (iOS engineer)
• Isis (iOS engineer)
• Jeff (backend engineer)
• Sylvia (web engineer)

Kaizen is a Japanese term for continuous improvement. We fully embody kaizen and at every level, work to achieve small incremental changes in processes (as a team, as individuals, in our product) in order to improve efficiency and quality.

This commitment to improvement and bettering ourselves is what differentiates us from others. The reality is that most things decay and get worse over time. Organizations, products, and even people trend towards mediocrity over time due to inertia. We at Universe believe that with effort, process, and care, we can actually become better overtime. We as individuals want to get better every week, so that our product gets better every week. We want our individual contributors to get better every week so that our team gets better every week.

We get to build a product that changes the way the world trades, and we get to do it alongside people who inspire us every day.

We’re driven by a collective desire to change trade and have fun doing it. Our leaders have deep domain knowledge (having previously founded multi-million dollar startups) and experience managing teams handling hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. They’ve mastered the logistics industry and know how to lead us down the right path.

Our engineers span a wide range of backgrounds, and we take special pride in that. We have seasoned engineers from large, successful tech companies, who bring industry best practices and high standards. We also have product-minded ex-founders, brilliant newcomers, and more. We love having a diverse group on our team, and hope you’re the next to join us!