If you’re a developer, data scientist or product person reading this at work, there’s a good chance you’re bored. You don’t have to be, though. Austin is full of tech companies that need top talent to execute critical projects and solve complex problems.
Take Care.com, which operates a two-sided marketplace that matches local caregivers with people in need of babysitters, senior home health aides, tutors and more. Engineering at Care.com is high stakes, with Rav Pasricha, senior VP of engineering, telling Built In Austin just how crucial his team’s code is.
“The reality is that if our engineering teams aren’t delivering innovative tech solutions to our customers, a working mom fails to find a babysitter for an important meeting she can’t miss or an adult son scrambles to find a caregiver for his aging mother who fell and broke her hip,” Pasricha said.
Maybe you enjoy breaking down complex challenges into their components and solving them step by step. Jim Moore, VP of engineering at enterprise cybersecurity automation company SailPoint, said the challenges his team tackles take months to unwind and require considerable cross-team collaboration.
Care.com and SailPoint are hiring for devs, data scientists and product professionals right now, as are the eight other tech companies featured here, all of which offer the opportunity to do important and challenging work.
What they do: Enterprise companies use SailPoint’s technology to automate the process of approving who can access technology and at what level of permission.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Of course, they need to be smart, but we also have a pretty firm “no jerks” policy, so they need to be good teammates and fun to work with. But to really succeed they need to be curious. Why was this API built this way? What’s that weird spike in that dashboard? Once they understand what is happening and why, they follow through on improving the code base and strengthening operational processes.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Our platform and data intelligence teams are focusing on capabilities to allow us to rapidly integrate new products and services. Organic growth within our core products will always be the key pillar of our growth strategy, but acquisitions and integrations also play a sizable role in accelerating the growth of the business.
How can we enable “arms length” integrations between products so that we can enable cross-product workflows and features with minimal cross-team coordination or disruption to individual product roadmaps? How do we efficiently load data into our data lake from disparate cloud providers or even on-premises applications? How can we rapidly prototype and develop new features and AI models with that data? These are hard problems but exciting ones, and I can’t wait to see what we build.
Most problems we solve are large in scope and require weeks or months of work from multiple engineers.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Collaborative. We solve a lot of hard problems at SailPoint. Building any service that can scale to the needs of the largest enterprises in the world is a non-trivial problem, but identity management is especially complex. This is not a place where you show up to work, pop on your headphones and work one ticket after another until it’s time to clock out. Most problems we solve are large in scope and require weeks or months of work from multiple engineers.
Our engineers work closely with product managers, UX designers and engineering managers to make sure we all deeply understand the problem we are trying to solve. They spend hours in whiteboarding and design sessions with their fellow engineers to align on how we intend to solve the problem and weeks or months working closely with their teammates to deliver a solution that delights our customers.
What they do: Decide is an adtech company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to create models that automate ad selection and impression pricing decisions.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Original thinking. No matter what role you’re pursuing, being deeply curious — to the point of original thoughts — enables identifying better solutions. Decide is rarely prescriptive with technical solutions. Rather, we start with a goal and provide considerable freedom to get creative and rapidly test new ideas. In order to really thrive on the team, you should be hungry to learn and hungry to experiment. The more you understand about every aspect of the company and its technical toolkits and can weave in concepts from external domains, the stronger your intuition will be and the greater your results.
Each role does have a minimum level of skill required, but with that said, team members with no formal comp sci training have also excelled. We’d want to see demonstrable proficiency, though, such as non-tutorial code you’ve written to solve a real-world problem. Essentially, as long as you can translate original thinking into real-world results, we’d be excited to learn more about you.
To really thrive on the team, you should be hungry to learn and hungry to experiment.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Our number one priority is to support and scale our Decision Marketplace, a proprietary decision platform much like a set of building blocks for expert-level decision-making in the real world. The Decision Marketplace powers the digital advertising platform at the core of our business, so it really is the future of Decide. It enables users with a range of technical expertise to build, train, test and deploy machine learning models in minutes, trimming R&D cycles from months to days.
Ultimately, we have ambitious plans for the real-world applications of the Decision Marketplace, but for 2023 our focus remains on positioning Decide as the leader in the adtech industry. All of our technical teams are responsible for maintaining and scaling the tech behind our ad platform, and ML analysts and engineers in particular will drive the expansion of the Decision Marketplace.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Innovative. That’s not my word; I hear it all the time from people throughout the company. I’ve heard it from an ML engineer who is thrilled to be in such an evolving and challenging environment to the point where she brags about it to friends in the field. One of our principal engineers is drawn by the personal ownership that he takes over the projects he’s tinkered with. An integration software engineer loves poking around in her code and shaping conditions to create or discover a new effect.
Technical team members at all levels and across departments truly thrive on having direct access to our CTO. They’re able to pick his brain at any time, and he’s a phenomenal teacher who’s excited to bounce back ideas with people. That innovative culture is what draws people to the team, and it’s what keeps them here for six, eight and even 10-plus years.
What they do: 2K is a video game company whose game development studios produce mobile, console and computer games, including “NBA 2K,” “Sid Meier’s Civilization” and “WWE SuperCard.”
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Adaptability and flexibility. 2K as an organization is constantly evolving and learning as the industry grows. A core value at 2K is to be nimble and pivot quickly, making adaptability and flexibility vital to success. Candidates should also demonstrate dependability, responsibility and consistency in their job performance.
A core value at 2K is to be nimble and pivot quickly, making adaptability and flexibility vital to success.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Building a central tech platform that is a scalable, repeatable and tailored software solution to simplify back-end game development for game studios. Fundamentally, this central tech platform is a collection of core microservices that game studios can use to simplify their development process for any new title. It will shoulder the responsibility for a significant chunk of back-end development, freeing up game studios to focus on high-value, player-visible front-end development. Part of this central tech platform project also includes software development kits for game clients, servers and websites, with these libraries helping tech services work flawlessly on studio game builds. The libraries are available in several coding formats including C++, Unity, UE4, JavaScript and Go.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Passion. We are truly in the creative and entertainment industries, and these industries are very different in terms of quantity, quality, risk or loss. You must have passion to build the best product for our consumers and the willingness to go that extra mile. It’s not transactional.
There is a saying that when you work on what you are passionate about it does not feel like work. Each of our team members are so passionate about what they do, and that is reflected in their work. We believe in work hard, play hard, and our games and tech show it!
What they do: Two Barrels is the technology arm of Registered Agents Inc. — which provides registered agent services to business owners — and handles all of its parent company’s software development, marketing and operations needs.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
The most important skill here is the willingness to learn and pick new things up quickly. It’s vitally important that we stay up to date with the latest tools, languages, frameworks and libraries. We are always pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones by learning about new technologies, and the best part is we are given a lot of autonomy to choose what new technologies we use.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We have a few large and exciting projects coming up this next year, the most important of which is “Atlas.” We are rebuilding our entire system to ensure long-term success for our customers and employees. It’s the foundation for all of our future services and products that we’ll be offering, and when done right it will help grow the team and the company by leaps and bounds for years to come.
The next large project is “StageLine.” It’s a free and robust tool that guides a client through every step of their company’s lifecycle. Our first version was a great kick-off point, and our second version should be a huge success!
Unlike the rest of the industry, we place a higher emphasis on building friendships first and then cranking out awesome software second.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
It’s incredibly hard to describe our diverse team’s culture in one word, but “compassion” seems to encompass a lot of our traits. You’ll be hard-pressed to find many software teams who are not only incredibly smart but also very empathetic and welcoming. Unlike the rest of the industry, we place a higher emphasis on building friendships first and then cranking out awesome software second.
Our team’s superpower is compassion, and we use this when stepping into our customers’ shoes and looking at problems from their perspective or when simply reviewing each other’s code or hammering out some awesome code in a pair programming session. That empathy reminds us there is always more to learn from your fellow engineer and we’re stronger together as a team when we rely on each other.
What they do: Moov Financial is a fintech company whose technology is designed to make it easier for developers to put payment functionalities into their products.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Any skill can be taught, which is why we care more about character traits. When evaluating a candidate, the one character trait we care most about is being a good human being. For instance, who are you as a person and what kind of energy do you put into the world? Do you exhibit honesty, integrity and generosity? Do you question convention, approach problems with creativity and regularly show gratitude to others? Our team is made up of tinkerers and creatives who are all driven to solve problems. We own our work and relentlessly push to make things better, but we don’t try to do it alone.
We know we’re better together, which is why we’re forthright about sharing ideas, progress, wins, obstacles and gratitude. We may be a fully remote team, but we make work visible and accessible so we can learn and grow together. Because we work together so closely and collaboratively, it matters more to us that you’re a good human being who’s passionate about the same things we are and not that you know all the right tools or programming languages.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We’re building something that’s never existed before, so we’ve spent considerable time and money ensuring our cloud-native platform is built with the best architecture and design principles. From the beginning, we made it a priority to incorporate all the necessary elements and natively weave in security and CI/CD capabilities.
Because we make it easy for businesses to accept, store, send and spend money all through one platform, our biggest project in 2023 will be expanding payment modality capabilities to help our customers unlock even more revenue. As a design-driven team, we care about every step of the user experience. Expanding capabilities within the platform provides our users with more optionality, and more optionality allows our customers to expand their use of Moov through our single API.
We’ve carefully crafted our culture so that builders can thrive.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
The answer ties back to why Moov hires based on a person’s character versus skill set. The word “passion” is thrown around a lot, and it’s hard to believe anyone could be passionate about having a job. That’s why we’ve carefully crafted our culture so that builders can thrive. When work-life balance is respected, leadership openly communicates and team members regularly lean in and help each other, it creates a passion for the culture. When engineers get to teach us how they want to be managed and their work is recognized and celebrated, they become passionate about the company.
When smart people are given tough problems to solve and are completely trusted to find the right solutions, they become passionate about the work. When the same engineers get to see the impact their work has on the product — which in turn saves other developers so much time, money and frustration — they become passionate about the mission. Everyone on our team is passionate about what we are doing and takes pride in the quality of everything we touch and do. Because we sweat the details, iterate often, stay curious and challenge the hell out of our comfort zones, it’s passion that sets us apart.
What they do: Care.com is a two-sided marketplace designed to help caregivers find more work and to make it easier for people in need of pet sitters, babysitters, in-home senior care and more to connect with local professionals.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
A candidate looking to join my team should have a burning desire to play a pivotal role in Care.com’s mission to help families find the care that they need. That mission is really important to us, and we are actively in search of candidates who are motivated by it. We are proud to have built a team of accomplished technologists who not only bring great talent to the table but are dedicated and passionate about showing up to work each day to help families find care and caregivers find meaningful work.
We’re doing meaningful and impactful work that significantly improves the lives of families and caregivers worldwide.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We are constantly innovating and testing, and it comes as no surprise that 2023 will be an exciting year to be a part of one of our tech teams. Engineering in particular will play a key role in planning and building new features to help families find a caregiver. We know that as a family’s schedule evolves, their care needs change with it, so we’re working to better address those specific needs and match them with high-quality caregivers through an ever-improving user experience on our site and apps.
The reality is that if our engineering teams aren’t delivering innovative tech solutions to our customers, a working mom fails to find a babysitter for an important meeting she can’t miss or an adult son scrambles to find a caregiver for his aging mother who fell and broke her hip. We’re doing meaningful and impactful work that significantly improves the lives of families and caregivers worldwide.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Empathy. Our culture is deeply rooted in how we empathize with the care needs of families, caregivers and our teammates. Care.com is a fast-paced and innovative tech company, but we recognize that the actual service of caregiving is human. We are cognizant of how important it is to connect with each other on a personal and human level. When we take a step back from our day-to-day tasks and practice empathy with the very people who make the Care.com platform what it is, it sets us all up for success.
What they do: Striveworks’ low-code/no-code platform is designed to make it easier to train, test, deploy and update machine learning models.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Adaptability. The landscape of our work means that each month we may have a new focus. We keep our team nimble as we continue to build out the feature sets that are of primary importance to our growing customer base. We want team members who are comfortable or even thrive in an environment that encourages quick prototyping and testing. If you make it clear that you can adapt to new requirements, technologies and languages, then we enthusiastically want you on our team.
We want team members who are comfortable or even thrive in an environment that encourages quick prototyping and testing.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
We will launch version 1.0 of Chariot, our end-to-end MLOps platform, in early 2023, after completing exhaustive customer trials this year. The goal is a battle-hardened feature set that aligns with the needs of our Fortune 500 commercial customer base. After we launch, our team will continue to build out our no-code/low-code platform to handle the machine learning tasks that will transform customers’ data into decision-ready insights, and we will devote critical focus to the reliability and performance of the platform.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Ownership. Each team member feels individual responsibility for the collective performance of the Striveworks team. We’ve been named one of the top emerging vendors of 2022 and are number three on the list of 150 fast-growth companies in our industry. We attribute both achievements to our team members taking ownership in everything they do: owning outcomes during feature development, answering questions from customers and sharing knowledge with team members to avoid a single point of failure.
What they do: CertifiD provides digital identity and device verification solutions to home buyers and sellers, law firms and title agents to help prevent wire fraud during real estate transactions.
What’s one character trait a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
Drive. A candidate should be proactive, confident and have a history of getting things done. A driven candidate will hold themselves to a high bar, cooperate effectively with their team, communicate appropriately and recognize the value of the vision their team is working toward.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
In 2023, our technical team will be working hard to take what we’ve built to help prevent fraud in real estate and make it applicable to other industries and transactions. This is exciting because it will challenge our team to find new and better ways to securely transact sensitive and important data on a larger stage. The success of these efforts will not only enable our company to grow, but more importantly it will help us put an end to fraud.
We encourage innovation, experimentation, failing early to succeed and expect each team member to continuously level up.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Progress. We are the front line in a growing business with an important mission to accomplish. “Progress” describes the expectation for each team member’s contributions, drive and cooperation. We are purposeful in our culture and shy away from self-absorbed or abrasive personalities because they tend to hinder progress. We encourage innovation, experimentation, failing early to succeed and expect each team member to continuously level up. We want candidates with vision who can see the end result of each project and make measurable progress to get there.
What they do: Plumbers, electricians, home contractors and other businesses that work in the field use RealWork Labs’ to advertise their work where it happens via check-ins on Google Maps.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
The skills I really look for are soft skills like communication, critical thinking and proactivity. There are so many talented product designers who are technically skillful — especially in Austin — and over the years, I’ve come to realize that it’s soft skills that make someone a great team member.
The skills I really look for are soft skills like communication, critical thinking and proactivity.”
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
One of our biggest focuses is the mobile app. We really want to optimize the experience of our core mobile users, technicians and contractors. By learning more about their day to day, we can understand and empathize with their highs and lows. In doing so, we can identify ways to make their day better by making it easier to achieve their goals.
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Friends. While we’re all passionate about making our product better, at the end of the day we all like each other and enjoy hanging out outside of work, too.
What they do: Moov operates a global marketplace for pre-owned semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
What’s one character trait or skill set that a successful candidate should have to land a spot on your team?
The top trait we value is a high level of autonomy while maintaining a collaborative orientation. Each Moover brings a high level of technical skill while also being able to speak to architecture, design, UI/UX, product or reliability. They are expected to have an outsized impact while also being able to work well with others to coordinate and synergize on larger and more far-reaching initiatives.
What’s the biggest project your technical teams are planning for 2023, and why is it important for the success of the business as a whole?
Internal and external user empowerment dominates the technical roadmap for 2023. Initiatives range from a more interactive and full-featured marketplace to expanding our equipment configuration capabilities to create the best possible match between buyers and tools.
Engineering at Moov ships quickly and often, relentlessly seeking out the most direct route to the best solution.”
How would you describe your tech team culture in a single word, and why would you choose that word?
Scrappiness. We’re a small team but have a very high marginal impact. Engineering at Moov ships quickly and often, relentlessly seeking out the most direct route to the best solution while still valuing reliability, observability and extensibility. We take feedback seriously and regularly deliver new features and products while also improving the capabilities the company was built upon.
