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 tons of opportunities for those interested in depth, there are just as many for those looking for breadth. Instacart is a four-sided marketplace that connects customers, shoppers, retailers, and brands. As a result, there are many opportunities to explore the intersections between our end users. We have unique and complex problems to solve because we focus on how consumer, advertising, ecommerce, and enterprise products interact with one another.

We are a collaborative team that values learning from each other.

As a small and agile team, we’re more than willing to step into adjacent roles or help support other team members as needed. Whether it’s lending a hand with design, QA, or product panning, engineers have the opportunity to touch multiple parts of the business. We take a language-agnostic approach to building software. Once developers demonstrate that they have a fundamental understanding of full stack programming, they are given a lot of flexibility to learn and seek mentorship on the job as they build the technologies that deliver our astrological content to our users.

While we want employees to feel they have ownership over their roles, we believe it’s also important to learn from our peers. For example, an iOS developer might also work on backend systems, Lambdas, and databases. In order to excel at CHANI, engineers should have a strong understanding of how the backend connects to the frontend and vice versa. As we continue to expand the team, this is especially important since we’ll be migrating our native iOS app to React Native to deliver the CHANI app to both Android and iOS users.

It’s safe to say we’re constantly learning and growing as a team in order to both improve our personal skills and back up each others’ knowledge bases. Being able to understand the larger picture helps us build the best product possible.

As a small-but-nimble team, we encourage folks to fill in gaps and expand their skill sets.

We are a small engineering team within a rapidly-growing company in a new and quickly-evolving market. We continue to operate like a startup, staying nimble so we can innovate and outmaneuver competitors. Since we encourage people to work with folks from other departments, engineers might end up on a customer call, talking about a new feature or hearing from a customer directly. It’s also common for our tech leads to wear product manager hats.

While there are certainly opportunities for those who prefer to specialize, there are many fresh and interesting product initiatives for engineers who love diving into new challenges, working cross-functionally, and expanding their horizons. For example, when we decided to build a mobile app, Cody stepped up and took the lead despite having no prior experience in mobile development. He worked directly with Thani, our VP of Product Design, as well as other stakeholders to gather requirements and ensure that the app adds real value for our customers.

We believe in leaving your ego at the door.

Part of joining any early-stage startup is getting to wear many hats. We firmly believe in leaving ego at the door and helping out wherever you can. But this doesn’t mean we regularly throw people into the deep end – we work hard as a company to document what is needed from each team and team member.

This way, if someone is stepping into a new set of responsibilities, they have a clear picture of what is reasonably expected and how to succeed in that role. We believe that every moment counts, and building a high-performing team requires a combination of willingness to roll up your sleeves, clear boundaries, and concrete goals.

For instance, in addition to his day-to-day work as a full-stack engineer and eng lead, Tristan is the driving force behind patient panels. He stepped up to create a series of monthly patient panels, where the entire HumanFirst team hears directly from patients with chronic conditions about how they’re using connected sensors in their daily lives. These patient stories and details about what life is like in clinical trials have been invaluable to the company.

Another great example of wearing many hats is James. Along with his regular tasks as a software engineer, he also oversees security and compliance, ensuring our code is safe and sensitive data is secure.

Another hat engineers can wear: Teacher! The team designed and printed these PCBs during a tech talk led by one of our engineers, James.

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.

We actively avoid silos.

Engineers are involved in product development in all aspects of the life cycle, from conception, to helping with design, to launching with our marketing team. We believe the most important factor is your capacity and enthusiasm in growing and learning new skills, not your working background with a specific language or framework. We appreciate wide ranging experiences and encourage people to jump in on a variety of problems.

Even though we do have specialists around, we encourage engineers to push the boundaries of the traditional divide between front-end and back-end. We support engineers in learning new technologies, developing their versatility, and exploring skills outside of their prior experience.

Ultimately we are a multi-disciplinary team that is willing to solve problems with high-quality software. If you’re excited about gaining exposure to all parts of the business and codebase, we’d love to hear from you!

Job descriptions aren’t set in stone.

If you have a creative spirit, you’ll fit in well here. We look for generalists over specialists and seek out people who are excited about filling gaps and wearing many hats. New engineers who join the team can expect to wear both designer and product hats. For instance, Cris​​tóbal is working on two radically different styles of programming and thinking: a whiteboard tool for our video editor (a user-facing graphics program), and performance optimizations for the video decoder (a core low-level program). We are extremely transparent with decision-making and encourage input from engineers on everything from design philosophy (we once had a book-length Slack thread about the theory of our background color) to business strategy.

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

When you join Nova, you won’t be pigeonholed. You’ll 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," even if it means taking on projects outside of our day-to-day responsibilities. There are various engineering and company-wide initiatives that welcome new ideas and members. You can join or participate in our inclusion committee, help plan our next offsite, sit in on BD meetings, or contribute to sourcing and recruiting efforts.

For example, Gervonte and Sophie worked on getting our Engineering Blog launched. James worked with a few other engineers to organize a company-wide hackathon. Addy leads and improves our documentation efforts. Marissa and Sam also took part in a DEI Task Force and organized a resume-review event for students from various universities.

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.

Backend, frontend, project management – you’ll have the opportunity to do it all.

At this stage, given our company’s size, engineers are involved in many different things. It’s not required that new hires have a wide breadth of experience, but we do look for people who have a willingness to jump in and take on a wide variety of tasks (even if it’s not in your job description). Whether it’s helping out on the front end, back end, in technical program management, or even project management, no two days are the same and you’ll have the opportunity to be exposed to all different parts of the company.