At LightStep, you're not restricted to checkboxes on a job description.

While we provide support for both management and individual contributor tracks, where we shine most at LightStep is in the agency we give team members to define their roles at the company. For example, Isobel Redelmeier shaped her own hybrid role. “I knew I wanted some sort of challenge/change of pace beyond the traditional IC engineer role, but I didn't necessarily know what I wanted that to look like,” she says. “Was it PMing? speaking more? something else? The LightStep leadership seemed genuinely open to finding the right alignment between employee interests and business needs, rather than disincentivizing anything outside of the exact, on-paper job requirements.” This led Isobel to her current role as an open source software engineer where she partakes in a combination of engineering, project management, and community work.

Ultimately, our leadership genuinely cares about finding the right alignment between each person’s interests and the company’s business needs. In the search for our first engineering managers, we hired experienced external candidates and also shifted Daniela Miao, one of our early software engineers, into an EM role to help her realize her career goals. She’s since played a crucial role in designing our new interview processes and keeping LightStep’s focus on people as we grow.

You have room to explore at Vanta.

Our business is strong and growing, and our team is small. We’ve de-risked and proved out a lot, but there’s many more open questions we’re excited to tackle together.

If you’re an engineer curious about sales, we’ve got prospects with whom you can work; if you’re an engineer who loves designers, we’ve got loads of product surface for you. If you’d like to design entire products, we’ve got room for that too – and as Vanta grows, you’ll be known as the architect of that product.

You have room for growth whether you’re moving up or moving sideways.

For a long time, Algolia strived to maintain a flat organization to promote ownership and give people the room to drive major features. As we grew, we started needing middle management to operate efficiently and have promoted many engineers to be leads. Our team is ~40 engineers and we’re organized into 11 squads: Infrastructure, Developer Experience, Intelligence, Web, Visibility, Instant Search, Analytics, Discovery, Index, Instant Search for Mobile, and Search API. We promote our engineering leads from within and also fully support people to make lateral moves. Everyone has the ability to transfer to a different squad. We’ve also had people at the company change roles. For instance, Nicolas was previously a solutions engineer and later transitioned into his current role as a product manager.

In 2018, 30% of our jobs were filled internally.

Carbon Black is passionate about growing our employees. Not only have we seen people move up in their current teams or relevant departments, but we’ve also seen people move from completely different roles.

Each department is given a certain budget for learning and development. Sometimes managers choose what they want to send members of their teams to (based on internal/team needs), and other times members will pitch trainings, conferences, or MeetUps that are important to them. For instance, we frequently send our engineers conferences such as DevOps Days, SANS, Cubecon, AWS re:Invent, Black Hat, RSA, Grace Hopper Celebration, and many more. We also provide trainings, like Agile leadership and Kanban, for our team members.

As just one example, our campus recruiter moved into a product owner role last spring and is now a product owner team lead! There are many other examples of how we develop people at Carbon Black. To put it simply, we invest in our people and want to see them grow their careers in ways that make sense with their personal goals. We’re always evaluating new ways to support our employees and offer them more. In fact, our Chief People Officer will be moving into a new role in January that will be focused on training and growing our employees as leaders.

We have an Internal Mobility team dedicated to facilitating transitions within Square.

Caviar is growing, and so is our parent company, Square! This growth presents endless opportunities for increasing responsibility and professional growth, and fuels a steady stream of new roles, responsibilities, and teams. It's common for Square engineers and managers to hold several roles on different teams during their tenure at the company. Managers and engineers work together to map out learning and growth goals, then identify projects and teams that contribute to those goals. When someone's career path is best served by transferring teams, their manager is there to help make it happen.

Our Internal Mobility team also has a wiki to help facilitate internal transitions. Here’s an excerpt: "We operate with a growth mindset, meaning we love seeing you excel in your current role, and also support movement to a new role. Our goal is to ensure that the transition between the two is as smooth, transparent, and quick as possible. […] Your career is in your own hands at Square. We have a large amount of resources available to you to explore internal opportunities, along with programs available to help you grow in your current role."