For some, it’s a bit too early to be thinking about 2023 with the holidays still around the corner. Sourabh Vora, a principal engineer and team lead at Motional, isn’t one of those people.
Motional builds autonomous rideshare and delivery vehicles, and in 2023, Vora’s team will be developing machine learning models to train these driverless cars to respond just like humans when they see debris on the road. Those who know a thing or two about autonomous vehicles know just how difficult this will be.
“This is challenging as we don’t usually see such objects on the road in our regular day-to-day drives, so we will need to develop machine learning models that operate on minimal data,” Vora said.
Over at Dubsado, devs are gearing up to transition the B2B business management platform to React. Sam Gioia, director of product, said that this isn’t just an exercise in rewriting code but rather an opportunity for the team to redesign features based on user feedback.
If either of these two scenarios sounds exciting then we have two pieces of good news. First, in addition to Motional and Dubsado, there are a handful of other local tech companies giving engineers a lot to look forward to next year. Second, all of these companies are hiring now, and you can learn more about what they’re working on below.
GOAT Group operates three platforms for new and vintage sneakers and apparel: GOAT, Flight Club and Alias. The company was founded in 2015 and has raised almost $500 million in funding.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
A continuous desire to learn and the ability to adapt are two core skills that when paired together make someone a strong candidate. It’s important to find candidates who can understand the new requirements and adjust their solutions to account for new information. Our engineering team continues to explore and implement new technologies and key practices, not just for development but also for observability and security. The continuous growth of the company brings new challenges for our team. With that, we want to make sure we are keeping our standard of building scalable and safe experiences that are true to the GOAT brand. A successful candidate will find challenges like this exciting.
Seeking insight and knowledge from each other is easy and our senior developers are always open to sharing knowledge with more junior developers.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of GOAT?
As cliche as it sounds, every ongoing project is important to the success of the business because every ongoing project is a building block to the next one. We iterate on successful initiatives and make them better through our learnings. In doing so, we are already looking toward the future, even beyond 2023.
Our yearly Black Friday event, where we build out the amazing experiences our design team and founders cultivate, is a testament to GOAT’s innovation. The success of Black Friday finds its way into our projects for the following year and the cycle continues. No matter what project you’re on at GOAT, your work has a direct impact on the success of the organization.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Unique. In my career, I’ve never encountered a team quite like the one here at GOAT Group. I’m on the front-end team and also participate in a number of pods, but what holds true across those teams is how people interact with each other. In my experience, the team is humble yet hungry to learn and is full of amazing problem solvers who are also gracious.
Seeking insight and knowledge from each other is easy and our senior developers are always open to sharing knowledge with more junior developers. And most of all, we all love a good feature to work on, own and see through to delivery. I’m glad for the experiences I’ve had with the tech team here.
Motional builds autonomous rideshare and delivery vehicles. The company was founded in 2020 by automotive manufacturer Hyundai and Aptiv, which specializes in automotive electrical systems and vehicle safety and automated driving tech.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
My team develops the perception system for Motional’s autonomous vehicles (AVs), so naturally, machine learning and software development expertise are what we look for. But I would argue that having a growth mindset is equally important, if not more.
Whatever the decision, be it our projects for a quarter or even how the promotion cases in our team are evaluated, we let the data speak for itself.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of Motional?
My team’s main challenge is to improve our perception stack’s capability to detect rare generic objects on the road. For example, let’s assume an accident happens in front of our AVs and there is a big pile of debris in the middle of the road. We as humans are good at avoiding such objects and AVs should have the capability to do the same. However, this is challenging as we don’t usually see such objects on the road in our regular day-to-day drives so we will need to develop machine learning models that operate on minimal data.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Being a team working on machine learning, we live and breathe data and metrics. And it is not just related to building our machine learning models: Data and metrics are fundamental to everything we do. Whatever the decision, be it our projects for a quarter or even how the promotion cases in our team are evaluated, we let the data speak for itself.
Reformation is a sustainable fashion company offering shoes, dresses, jeans and more. Regarding its commitment to sustainability, the company is a certified B-Corp and has a goal to remove more carbon emissions from the environment than it produces by 2025.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Curiosity about what drives our customers and how to build engaging systems. Reformation technologists are genuinely interested in what excites our customers and the experiences they care about in our online and retail stores. Our teams are passionate about discovering better ways to build systems and applications that our customers will love. At the end of the day, it’s our people that make things happen and everyone plays an important role in achieving our goals together.
We celebrate each other’s successes, as our friends and coworkers pick up new skills, learn advanced technologies and excel in their career development.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of Reformation?
In 2022, we re-platformed our e-commerce, ERP and WMS platforms. Our tech team will continue scaling our capacity in 2023 by building out a warehouse and distribution center in Holland to better serve our enthusiastic European customers. Customers will get their purchases faster, and we’ll spend less energy flying products over the ocean. To support our international fans, we are launching localized versions of TheReformation.com, starting with Germany. This is just one of many exciting projects we’re accomplishing as we continue our growth plans.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Supportive. Reformation technologists work together to solve complex problems. We celebrate each other’s successes, as our friends and coworkers pick up new skills, learn advanced technologies and excel in their career development. We’re also fortunate to work with our cross-functional partners, both technical and creative, which adds to the fun of gaining more exposure to the business. We value work-life balance, so we support each other in having full lives outside the virtual office. Diversity and inclusivity are important to Reformation; we feel confident being our authentic selves while doing great work together.
Thrive Market is an online, membership-based grocery store offering organic food, supplements and cleaning products on a subscription basis. Thrive Market is a certified B-Corp and offers free annual memberships to students, teachers and families in need, among other groups.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
The best engineers I work with all embody a strong ownership mindset. This is the number one character trait I look for when hiring because it’s what sets people up for success at Thrive Market. Engineers with an ownership mindset look at projects holistically and are not discouraged by challenges. Rather, they find creative ways to get things done, especially when things get tough.
We are looking for engineers who are eager to work on new challenges and take responsibility for the outcomes and quality of work, not just the output. If needed, they are willing to wear multiple hats and go above and beyond to achieve their goals.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of Thrive Market?
As we move to 2023, one of the biggest focus areas for my team is to improve the member experience on thrivemarket.com, particularly with an eye for speed, especially for those with a poor connection. We monitor web load metrics, like time to interactive, and have been chipping away every quarter at improving the site speed. In 2023 we’re set to tackle new, impressive projects that will deliver major wins for our 1.2 million members. Coupled with improving user experience, this will also be a big business win that ultimately improves our SEO ranking and e-commerce conversion.
Engineers with an ownership mindset look at projects holistically and are not discouraged by challenges.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
We embrace the product-oriented delivery model, or POD, when it comes to feature delivery. Every feature team works toward a single business goal, and every pod team is self-sufficient and consists of front-end engineers, back-end engineers, data analysts, QA and a product manager. This setup enables us to launch features at a fast clip and foster fruitful relationships between cross-functional team members within the pod.
We do not spend a lot of time perfecting features. Rather, we work iteratively to launch new features quickly and make decisions based on data, ultimately allowing our team to see the real-world impact we’re making with every new feature launch. To me, embracing the POD model is the highlight of the tech team culture and one that puts us in a great place to deliver wins to our members.
Dubsado’s is a B2B online platform for small business owners to manage client documents, payments, projects and more.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
I am always looking for a scrappy team player. Being self-funded, we deeply value making the most of the resources we have and listening carefully to our users to inform good bets. Our company values and the feedback we hear from our users will continue to drive our decisions even as we explore using more metrics.
Being scrappy also means taking the initiative to ensure that we are always doing our best work for each other and our users, even when it’s challenging. “Taking initiative” and “doing our best work” aren’t platitudes — our users are business owners who trust us to power their invoicing, scheduling and client communications. If we fail, they could fail.
When taken to the extreme, being scrappy could look like never asking for help and working alone. That’s why being a team player is just as important. Our small, cross-functional product development teams rely on great communication and collaboration to succeed. Everyone on the team leaves their egos at the door, pitches in wherever needed and celebrates their wins together.
Being self-funded and keeping our teams small means that collaboration is more meaningful than it might be in a much larger corporate environment.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of Dubsado?
Our biggest project is transitioning Dubsado to React. Practically, this means every single part of our app needs to be rewritten with React. In true Dubsado fashion, we’re taking this as an opportunity to serve our users and grow. Instead of just rewriting what we had, we turned to our incredible wealth of user feedback and are redesigning each feature from the ground up. To me, that’s what makes this stage of our journey so exciting.
Dubsado has been around for almost seven years now, so we’ve validated our product and learned a lot about what our users need. Now we can take those learnings and build stronger foundations for each of our core features. It’s a slower process, but it is setting us up for more success in the future. The changes we are making now will make it possible to meet our biggest user demands — like a mobile app — and create opportunities for additional revenue.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Collaborative. We’ve purposefully fostered collaboration by setting up cross-functional product development teams. Each team includes developers, a product manager and a product designer so that every feature and update can be planned and executed with input from multiple perspectives. We also encourage partnerships between our product development teams and our customer care team to ensure our customers are centered in all that we do.
Being self-funded and keeping our teams small means that collaboration is more meaningful than it might be in a much larger corporate environment. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere, and all team members are welcome to contribute ideas and feedback.
MagicLinks operates a video influencer marketplace that helps companies like Nordstrom, Lululemon and Glossier reach new customers. In addition to connecting brands with influencers, the company also provides tools that enable the latter to more easily integrate e-commerce into their YouTube videos and Instagram posts.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
One of our core values is “give a lot of damns,” and we believe that true passion for your work is contagious. We all hold ourselves to a high level of personal excellence and take pride in every product and feature we deliver. We look for this passion and dedication in potential new hires and always aim to complement what is already present on our team.
With every release, we can see and feel the value we are adding to the company.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of MagicLinks?
The biggest project we are working on is moving the business to a recurring subscription-based revenue model. Beyond the impact on the bottom line, our goal is to deliver best-in-class experiences that our clients can’t live without. For MagicLinks, this low-touch high-margin commerce is a multiplier for our bottom line and will hopefully provide an unmatched experience for our users.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Ignited. We are energized and enthusiastic about our product roadmap and excited for the opportunity to grow our organization with new talent and fresh perspectives. With every release, we can see and feel the value we are adding to the company and look forward to increasing the velocity with which we can deliver that value.
Companies use Edify’s contact center software to ensure that support agents can better assist customers. Its platform does this by giving agents visibility into a customer’s interactions with support along with the ability to carry on conversations using different communication methods — from SMS to phone or even email — without having to wait on hold.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
We like to see curiosity and a love of learning. We are always looking for smart, talented problem solvers, but curiosity is what drives us to keep improving. Everyone on the team is focused on getting better every day and that is a big part of what drives Edify to keep growing the way that it has. We love curious, outside-of-the-box thinkers who are interested in helping us continue to push boundaries and change current standards.
There has never been a day where I did not feel like I had everything at my fingertips to do my best work.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of Edify?
We have a conference coming up in February 2023 where we will announce new projects and features. Until then, I am excited to be working on adding new features and improvements to our analytics engines, which power all of our reporting, charting and dashboard features that allow users to create powerful data visualizations of their activity on the platform.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Empowered. This is one of Edify’s core values and it really rings true. From day one, everybody is put in a position to start making a legitimate impact, whether it’s contributing to the product, our development processes or coming up with new ideas for the platform. We are given the best technology and tools to the point that there has never been a day where I did not feel like I had everything at my fingertips to do my best work.
With this empowerment comes a lot of autonomy in that every team member is given full ownership of their work and trusted to get the job done well. On the opposite side, there is also always a team member ready and more than willing to lend a hand when needed. Edify fosters an amazing culture that puts personal growth and empowerment in tandem with company growth.
