Engineering teams with a culture of wearing many hats

We are a collaborative team and our engineers, PMs, and designers work closely with our academic team members.

To support the interests and strengths of everyone on our team, there are various roles you can try out, or grow into. This isn’t a requirement, and thus some team members choose to focus on depth instead. Below is a little more information about what each of these roles do and who may be interested in them:

Product definition

One way that breadth shows up in this role is the overlap with product management work: sometimes, we need to be comfortable taking a high-level goal and figuring out how to get there, without a detailed spec. A few examples of these projects areas are performance optimization, capacity planning, and improving product stability. Other times there are more tangible specifications that come from working with our designers, product managers, and members of the academic team, like building specific new interfaces, product features, or entirely new products.

Tech lead

For folks who have not previously been in a technical leadership position but are interested in developing those skills, we have a tech lead role per engineering pod. We see Tech Lead as a role to play for a period of time, rather than a commitment along a career track.

High-level engineering support

We believe that being in touch with the challenges that our faculty and learners are running into helps to build a healthy sense of empathy and sense of product quality. We have engineering support rotations to periodically help out our frontline support staff.

Recruiting and interviewing

We include folks from across our team in the interviewing process. Whether you are seasoned at running interviews or completely new to it, we want to offer a way for you to be included in the interviewing process. We use pairing and shadowing in interview sessions to onboard and share knowledge.

We love generalists.

If you’re not an expert in one particular language, that is completely fine! We love engineers who are generalists and have experience with (or interest in) multiple languages and platforms. Be endlessly curious!

While there are plenty of opportunities for those interested in depth, there are many more for those looking for breadth. Instacart is a four-sided marketplace that connects consumers, shoppers, grocers, and big brands. As a result, there is so much surface area to explore the relationships between each of our end users. We have unique and interesting problems to solve here at Instacart because we focus on how consumer marketplaces, ecommerce, and enterprise products interact with one another.

There’s no one path to discover where your strongest passion lies.

At Wealthfront, we encourage engineers to explore and expand their interests by taking on various roles and projects they’re passionate about. While we’re a well-established company with a well-established product, there are a myriad of experiences and opportunities you won’t find in a lot of places. As software engineer Andrew Easton puts it, “The ability to learn and work on many different aspects of web code, deployment, infrastructure, and more is fantastic. But beyond even writing code, there are technical paths, area paths, management paths... and all of it is freely available to explore. It’s a great opportunity to really discover where your strongest long-term passion lies.”

Backend, frontend, public npm modules, heroku – you’ll do it all!

At this point, given our company’s size, everyone has their hands on everything. It’s not required that new hires come to ReadMe with a wide breadth of experience, but a willingness to jump in and learn different parts of our stack is important.

We also host an API conference called API Mixtape. Everyone in the company travels to San Francisco to attend and is encouraged to engage with our community. Engineers also have opportunities to speak! In the past, Marc has presented ReadMe’s new features and Dom gave a talk on best practices in API documentation. We have fun with the event and built a light display for the stage that changes color based on the current speaker’s company. The light display has been repurposed for our office wall and is editable via an API. (Ask for the web address if you want to change the lights in our office!)

We believe in leaving your ego at the door.

Part of joining any early-stage startup is getting to wear many hats. At HumanFirst, we firmly and proudly believe in leaving ego at the door and helping out wherever and whenever you can. Teammates regularly step-up to take on roles beyond their job descriptions when needed.

For instance, in 2020, we unveiled The Playbook, an open-science effort along with Genentech, Myokardia, Sage Bionetworks, the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), Scripps Research Institute, and more, to deploy safe and effective digital clinical measures at home. This was a cross-team effort involving engineering, product, design, and our research team. We have published over 12 research papers in top-peer reviewed open-access journals. Some of our engineering and product teammates have participated in these research publications.

One of our core values is ‘every moment counts.’ We act swiftly and intentionally – speed is a habit. As a growing organization, we look for teammates who are willing to roll up their sleeves when an opportunity arises that may not fit into anyone’s job description. That could mean stepping into product roles or redesigning our work trial for the recruiting process. Our entrepreneurial colleagues ensure that we are a high-performing team that’s consistently upgrading our processes to best serve patients.

Learn more about our open-access ‘The Playbook’ in Forbes. Sign up for a Masterclass on playbook.dimesociety.org.

We are growing quickly, so we encourage people to fill the gap and wear as many hats as they want.

Want to learn more about operations and the business side of Flexport? Phenomenal, do it. By taking the initiative to learn about pain points, you can own and build products to solve them. For example, Kevin (Senior Engineering Manager) built our permission policy system and single-handedly ran our infrastructure for over a year. He flew to our Shenzhen office to improve site performance behind the Great Firewall.

We’re a small team and most of us don’t have a tech background.

Each of our current team members have really diverse backgrounds, so we get to learn a lot from one another. For example, Mark and Steven are well versed in music and teaching, which lends themselves well to articulate expression of coding problems. Evangelina studied philosophy and worked in customer success, which helps her both think deliberately and empathetically about customer issues. Dan, Eileen, Lina, and Andrew all have creative backgrounds and have shipped gorgeous frontend experiences.

Perhaps more uniquely, we don’t silo anyone because of their labeled skillset. Action is the great equalizer. Have an awesome idea? Mock it up and show it off, then let’s see how we can either improve it or get it into production. At Monograph, an engineer can provide illustration work and a salesperson is able to give design feedback.

Curiosity and generosity are two of our core values.

We work in a cross-collaborative environment and believe that the less isolated we are in our disciplines, the more effective we can be at problem solving. We’re still refining our products and discovering the use cases and pain points our APIs can address across various industries—and everyone at Enigma has the opportunity to truly own a piece of the company’s roadmap. That’s why you’ll often see product people knee-deep in data or engineers weighing in on product vision—everyone is expected (and at the very least should be willing to try) to jump in and lend a hand.

There are endless opportunities at Enigma for people who are excited by new challenges and inspired by the chance to contribute and make an impact. Professional development opportunities—such as attending conferences or taking relevant classes—are open to all, and we even have access to a public speaking coach for anyone interested in giving talks or working on presentation skills. There are also frequent internal presentations, tutorials, and information sessions from team members eager to share their knowledge and skills with the company.

While we do have specialists across our entire engineering organization, we want a large part of our team to have breadth and be able to jump in on a wide variety of problems.

We want front end engineers that like to tweak APIs and update backing data models. We want back end engineers who make sure that the client SDKs are easy to use and running efficiently. We want engineers who solve problems at all levels, from the initial product conception to the maintenance and monitoring in production. We think this is important for a few reasons:

1. The less isolated engineers are in their particular disciplines, the better they will be at solving problems for our members and for other engineers.
2. We will never have enough people to do all the work we have. Being multi-disciplined (or being willing to try) means that you’ll be working on all sorts of problems.
3. The skills we need today may not be the same as the skills we need tomorrow. As we evolve, we want our engineers to evolve with us.

We don’t specialize, we’re looking for full-stack engineers.

While we’ll definitely cater to your interests, we’re looking for full-stack engineers. A lot of times our PMs are short-handed, so our engineers who are customer-minded enjoy stepping up. This goes hand-in-hand with owning your work and always thinking about how we can be customer-minded without jeopardizing the product.

You can expect the work to span the layers of the stack and should be willing to jump in where needed. For example, we’re currently looking for tech leads to help direct and make sure the rest of the engineers are documenting and that the documentation is being followed.

Ultimately, you’ll have the opportunity to try different things, so you can drive your education and career growth.

This isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle – you’ll jump into the deep end.

Being a startup, we value giving our employees the opportunity to gain a wide range of experiences. We believe in a “giving with healthy boundaries mindset,” meaning we value hard work (which sometimes means long hours), but all within reason. We definitely prioritize mental and physical health first and foremost.

We are scaling from a 21 person team to a 50+ person organization and now have two tech products under our belts. One is client-facing and helps our clients better track their spending. The other helps our trainers create financial plans faster and more efficiently. Since gaining so much traction and closing our Series A funding in January, we are ready to fully invest in our technology and develop an app that will carry us through the next stages of our company.

We’re looking for engineers who are excited for the breadth of work that needs to be done and are drawn to our mission of changing the financial services industry as we know it. If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We look forward to meeting you!

Engineers at Nova are full-stack and have their hands on more than just code.

Engineers rotate to different pods and projects, most of which are cross-functional. Initially, our job postings were divided into frontend and backend roles, but given that Nova engineers often work across the stack and have varied interests, we’ve since changed our open roles to “Software Engineer.” When you join Nova, you won’t be pigeonholed and have the option to fluidly move across our stack (and even do non-engineering tasks if you want).

Because we're a small company trying to accomplish big things, we take every opportunity to "tie each other's shoes." Team members often wear multiple hats, and sometimes this means doing maintenance tasks like (un)loading the dishwasher or building desks for new hires.

For engineers interested in getting involved in other kinds of work, we also have internal initiatives and task forces that welcome new ideas and members. You can join or participate in our inclusion committee, help to plan our next offsite, sit in on BD meetings, or contribute to sourcing and recruiting efforts.

If you’re interested in learning more about our team or talking to one of us, we’d love to hear from you! You can apply to jobs here or message any one of us on Linkedin.