Engineering teams with a culture of wearing many hats

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.

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

When you join Nova Credit, 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," (another one of our company core values) 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.

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.

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.

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.