With so many companies hiring across the Bay Area right now, sometimes it’s easier to have someone narrow down the field for you — and each month we strive to do just that. Here, we’ve identified four San Francisco tech companies worth checking out, with each contender broken down to pure nuts and bolts: the mission, the perks, the tech stack and a little insight from a leader on their team.
The mission: Affirm helps e-commerce businesses offer flexible, installment-based payment options. Their technology powers payment portals for the likes of Peloton, Rad Power Bikes, Yeti and Adidas, allowing users to pay off purchases over up to 18 months.
The perks: Affirm employees can make the most of stipends to cover learning and development costs, subsidies for commuters and outfitting remote offices and unlimited vacation. The company also prides itself on its diversity manifesto and employs dedicated DEI staff.
Affirm is now an even more attractive payment option for everyday wants and needs.”
Tech stack: Affirm is built using JavaScript, Kotlin, Python and Swift.
Quotable quote: “Affirm is now an even more attractive payment option for everyday wants and needs,” founder and CEO Max Levchin said when the company announced a $500 million funding round this September, which coincided with the release of a new bikweekly, interest free payment option. “We can also now better support merchants who offer smaller ticket items and bring their customers a more transparent, flexible way to pay.”
The mission: Gusto’s HR software helps more than 10,000 small businesses with their 401(k) plans, health insurance, team management, HR and payroll. Gusto recently ranked at 22 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list this year, and has raised more than $500 million to date.
The perks: Gusto offers sabbaticals and paid volunteering time along with other popular tech perks like company equity, free daily meals and commuter subsidies. Gusto employees also wear socks, slippers or bare feet — no shoes — when they’re in the office, which they say makes them feel more at home.
A lot of SaaS companies start with small businesses and then move to larger companies...but for us, it’s just an amazing segment to serve.”
Tech stack: Gusto’s technology is built in JavaScript and Ruby, supplemented with Ruby on Rails, React and Redux.
Quotable quote: “We love small business,” Co-founder and CEO Josh Reeves told Yahoo! Finance last year. “A lot of SaaS companies start with small businesses and then move to larger companies, and I think there are a variety of reasons for that. But for us, it’s just an amazing segment to serve. We have a great subscription business model to support it. I do have an opinion on the product quality — sometimes with the enterprise you get caught up in customizations. When you’re doing small business it’s more like [serving] consumers. You have to just build an easy-to-use product. There’s no book, there’s no manual, there’s no training guide, it just has to work from day one.”
The mission: Khoros’ customer engagement platform helps businesses utilize data to retain clients and develop customer relationships. Use cases include building support structure and developing marketing strategies, which help build the overall voice of a brand.
The perks: Khoros offers generous family leave, including a program to help new parents return to work, and allows unlimited vacation and paid volunteer time. Khoros also offers free lunches on Mondays and Thursdays.
We have people that come from all different backgrounds, from teachers to retail associates to retired military veterans.”
Tech stack: Khoros builds using MySQL and Redis databases and the React and Redux libraries.
Quotable quote: “You don’t have to have a background in our field to become a part of our Khoros team,” Chief Talent Officer Mike O’Donnell recently told Built In SF. “We have people that come from all different backgrounds, from teachers to retail associates to retired military veterans. We have created a culture of learning, which provides our team members with rigorous onboarding and continuous learning programs that make it possible for everyone at Khoros to learn, grow and develop their skills.”
The mission: Sovrn’s technology puts big data tools in the hands of content creators to distribute, monetize and expand their business. Reporting tools, ad training programs and site audits help turn any website or profile into a money-maker.
The perks: In addition to tech industry staples like unlimited vacation, fitness and commuter subsidies and 401(k) matching, Sovrn has a big internal focus on learning and development, with dedicated time throughout the work week for building skills and access to online course subscriptions.
Our data pipelines process and analyze billions of events per day.”
Tech stack: Sovrn engineers code in Golang, Java and Scala, assisted by the jQuery, React and Redux libraries and databases like Cassandra, Redis, Teradata and AngularJS.
Quotable quote: “Scalability is especially crucial for us since we handle tens of thousands of API requests per second,” E-commerce Engineering Manager Theo Chu recently told Built In SF. “Our data pipelines process and analyze billions of events per day. We support traffic from major publishers on the web and our partners expect us to handle their scale on a daily basis without sacrificing latency or reliability.”
