When you’re elbow deep in job applications and cover letters, you might not notice the lines blurring between what you can offer and what you want in return. Take this as an opportunity to get your career ducks in a row, and ask yourself: What would set your ideal workplace apart from all the rest?
For some, it’s the ability to work cross-functionally, while others may prize the flexibility to work from anywhere. For senior product designer Adora Tam, a supportive work environment that welcomes bold approaches is unbeatable. At Upwork, she’s not only found comfort in the often-intimidating design critique process, but the product team also encourages her to infuse creativity into how she approaches her work: “It’s reassuring to know that I’m actually encouraged to take bold risks in my work.”
We’ve all heard work-life balance thrown around as a must-have at work, but what if that balance also applied to the joy and meaning infused in work itself? Henrique Hirako can speak to that. On a recent project at Evidation Health, the senior software engineer was tasked with making back-end architectural decisions. Between the collaborative opportunities and the thrill of the project’s launch, Hirako realized his role granted him the best of both worlds: “In the past, I’ve asked myself if I wanted to work on something fun or something impactful. I’m glad I don’t have to choose between the two anymore.”
Built In San Francisco sat down with leaders from six local tech companies to learn about their standout culture and the recent projects that have made them each proud of the work they’re doing. Wondering if and where you could fit into those projects? The teams at Upwork, Evidation Health, Ethos Life, Opendoor, Sentry and AllStripes are all hiring now!
What’s one thing that makes your company culture special?
At Upwork, we’re incredibly lucky to have a workplace environment that fosters psychological safety. As a designer on the product team, it’s reassuring to know that I’m actually encouraged to take bold risks in my work. This creativity gets channeled into experiments like A/B testing and user research to challenge our assumptions. When a mistake is made or an experiment fails, we treat that experience as a learning opportunity to help us innovate.
Psychological safety also ensures that team members at all levels are welcome to speak up, ask questions and give honest feedback. For example, design critiques can be an intimidating process, but the design, research and writing team has created a safe space where we can share work in front of our peers and managers.” Team members start by asking thoughtful, clarifying questions before diving into feedback and solutions.
The team has created a safe space where we can share work in front of our peers and managers.”
What’s one company resource, program or benefit that has really enhanced your experience as an employee?
I’m a huge fan of Loom for asynchronous communication! Loom is a video and screen recording tool that is wonderful for remote teams because it’s so versatile, quick and easy-to-use. As a visual learner, videos help me understand and retain information better.
Loom has probably saved me hours of meetings and messaging. When I share design files and documentation, I also record a video to provide a voiceover explanation. My engineer partners and I send video demos and bug reports. Our entire product team — including our leadership — now uses videos to share news and updates.
This tool has completely changed the way we work, and I love that our own user community can also record Loom videos right in Upwork messages. I truly believe it will help freelancers and clients collaborate in new ways.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture special?
Ethos really tries to embody doing right by the customer. I know a lot of companies say that, but in life insurance distribution, this is an age-old concern. We are always thinking about how to do what’s best for our customers, even if that means selling them a policy that’s less profitable for us. One of our core values at Ethos is “serving our families,” and we are definitely motivated by that principle. We try to give them the best product and experience, while still saving them time and money.
One of our core values at Ethos is ‘serving our families,’ and we are definitely motivated by that principle.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently?
I’ve had the opportunity to work on an ongoing automation project, which has had a huge impact in terms of simplifying our customers’ process of obtaining a policy. It was cool that I was able to work cross-functionally with teams like operations, risk and actuarial, and product and engineering to deliver the project. I had to learn really quickly, and I was able to meet and work with so many other Ethosaurs. I started working on this shortly after I started at Ethos, and it was really rewarding to see how big of an impact I was able to make right away.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture special?
Evidation’s remote-work flexibility is outstanding, even before it became a necessity in 2020. We’ve always been a work-from-anywhere company — that could mean working from one of our offices, home or a coffee shop; it’s not prescriptive. When I first joined, I was working out of our headquarters in San Mateo and moved to Santa Barbara only two months later, where we have another amazing office — and even better weather. I usually go into the office once or twice a week for the opportunity to hang out with colleagues, eat lunch together and maybe play a game of ping pong. Currently, I’m working from Brazil while visiting family and friends. Where you work from, and the hours in which you work, is a non-issue.
My team is able to collectively work around the clock across many different time zones, spanning the West to East coasts in the U.S. and including our colleagues in Singapore. Sometimes there are five or more time zones between myself, in Brazil, and others who may be working in Europe; the sun does not set on my team! Being part of a highly distributed team also means that you don’t have to wake up early to check on a monitoring alert, since it’s always daytime for someone on the team.
We’ve always been a work-from-anywhere company — that could mean working from one of our offices, home or a coffee shop.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently?
LumiHealth! It’s a first-of-its-kind program designed by Singapore’s Health Promotion Board and other technology partners as part of the country’s Smart Nation initiative. The program is focused on encouraging healthy lifestyle changes through technology and has had a real impact on users’ well-being.
From the first day of the project, I was trusted to be responsible for many of the back-end architectural decisions, and it’s been an exciting journey. I’ve experienced great mentorship and team collaboration, and I’ve learned a lot throughout the project. Getting to see the project evolve and the team grow has been fantastic. And it would be pretty hard to beat the thrilling experience of launch day. There’s always some measure of nervousness, but — spoiler alert — it went really well.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture special?
At Opendoor, we encourage everyone to be 1 percent better every day. We value a growth mindset, are vocally self-critical and iteratively seek improvement. What stands out to me as unique is that every team or individual I work with approaches the job with honesty, feedback and a drive to continuously improve for our customers.
When I joined as a technical leader of the newly-minted transaction platform, we were tasked with formalizing the tool that defines the end-to-end customer transaction. This not only involved working with multiple stakeholders and several engineering teams, but also researching existing systems so we could continue to iterate while keeping the customer experience in mind. We had to make quick technical decisions on a daily basis and go back to the whiteboard multiple times to get to the final proposal. It truly was a cross-functional effort, and people across all teams at Opendoor are energized by constantly moving and improving.
Every team or individual I work with approaches the job with honesty, feedback and a drive to continuously improve.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently?
Opendoor works closely with several construction vendors to renovate properties before listing them on the market. An important aspect of assigning that work is knowing the locations — zip codes, to be precise — that they operate in.
I was tasked with proposing a solution to make it easier to visually capture the coverage for each vendor on a map. I did a quick proof-of-concept using several open-source mapping libraries and finally decided to write a custom widget that helps the user effortlessly draw on a map to select their zip codes. It was very interesting to convey this idea in the form of a working prototype and take feedback from business and design teams to quickly iterate on the final product. Based on user research, we found out that the newly-built widget helped reduce the vendor manager’s time by 50 percent because they no longer had to enter the data manually.
Being tasked with finding a solution, building it and then seeing it work for our users in real time motivates me and my team. We are building things that bring efficiency to industries that are still operating very manually. Seeing the difference it can make is exciting!
What’s one thing that makes your company culture special?
I feel very humbled to work at a company with such an open and collaborative culture. One of our core values is “feedback is priceless,” so we are always quickly iterating on ideas and sharing honest and productive feedback. This allows us to take risks and be bold — important parts of accelerating career growth. Because of this, working at Sentry never gets boring, and I feel genuinely valued.
It’s long been important to me to work toward a greater vision at Sentry, and for the first time, I’ve been trusted with the responsibility of a long-running project. Thanks to feedback from my peers and manager, I am able to grow and thrive in this opportunity without doubts or fear of failure. The culture here is definitely unlike any I’ve experienced elsewhere, and it’s exciting to see where we’re heading next.
We are always quickly iterating on ideas and sharing honest and productive feedback.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently?
I’m currently working on a cool project called Metrics. It’s about adding more accurate information to our application monitoring product at an unprecedented scale. My role in this initiative is to create interactive visualizations for this new data. At Sentry, metrics are important in the long term and require us to work together more closely than ever.
I’ve had the chance to work with many teams across departments, even outside of engineering. Likewise, this project has helped me learn more about our product and future direction. I am so thrilled about the challenges ahead and the impact we will create together.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture special?
Every week we have a “My Stripe” presentation where we learn about a rare disease from someone who has been personally impacted by it as a parent, child, caregiver, friend or patient. This always reminds me how special it is to work on problems that may have affected myself and my colleagues.
Connecting with a community-minded mission
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently?
Before Project Sea of Statuses, our users were “lost out at sea,” unsure of a patient’s location in their journey through the AllStripes platform. With Project SOS, we streamlined the user’s workflow and added statuses so that they can understand where a patient is in their journey.
