Home to some of the world’s most influential tech companies, San Francisco is renowned for its groundbreaking innovation. The following companies that call the Golden Gate city home have big plans for 2023 — and that includes hiring.
In fact, with approximately 375,000 tech roles currently available in the United States, the tech industry recently saw unemployment rates drop to 1.8 percent, according to a January report by CompTIA. Many hiring organizations are looking to stand out among the crowd by offering perks like remote work and wellness benefits, as well as fostering inclusive company cultures that keep employees around for the long haul.
For revenue platform Clari, that means embracing unique team identities to encourage seamless collaboration and developing stronger products through diverse skill sets. And at travel marketing platform Sojern, transparency and honest feedback fuel a successful culture experience by making sure every employee feels seen, heard and valued.
Clari is a revenue intelligence software that helps professionals with forecasting, pipeline management and other tasks.
Think back to your early days on the job. What surprised you or stood out to you most about Clari’s culture?
Clari has a culture that encourages us to strive for success and improve how we execute matters. We’re asked to dream big and then charge ahead to achieve it. We live and breathe our “Jazz Band” value, where we celebrate the unique identities of every Clarian and work together in tight collaboration.
Just recently, my team was involved in a large-scale rollout that had to be coordinated with multiple stakeholders across departments. It needed to be done carefully to ensure our customers could use our systems effectively. It was great having the engineering team work so collaboratively with professional services, product and customer success to ensure the outcome was successful, efficient and measurable.
Everyone had the same goal: to roll out the feature completely to customers and help educate them so they could empower themselves. The best part of this collaboration was the engineering team sessions where we would figure out ways to automate the process as much as possible to reduce inefficiencies.
Being involved in this project also allowed me to learn who does what as a newcomer at Clari, and figure out my niche in the company.
We live and breathe our ‘Jazz Band’ value, where we celebrate the unique identities of every Clarian and work together in tight collaboration.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I have been at Clari for eight months and in that time, I have refined what I currently think about product development and my role. My main priorities are my team’s well-being by making sure that we are enabling them to do their best work, and encouraging my team to build valuable products that help our customers.
As an engineer, you’re driven to always do your best. When you have to release a feature much more quickly than anticipated, it can feel like you have to take shortcuts to meet a deadline and sacrifice your engineering ideals. In my current role, I help my teams understand that it’s not an either/or situation. You can always deliver something valuable to customers as long as you figure out what is useful enough to ship and start from there.
To simplify the decision-making process for engineering practices, there should be standards that are adopted and keep everyone informed on how to leverage it. Be prudent on the time spent debating on perfection — it simply doesn’t exist. Spending time daily debating the pros and cons of API standards might be fun, but at the end of the day those debates mean nothing if we don’t have a product that can be used.
Sojern is a travel-centric marketing demand engine helping thousands of hotel, airline, attraction and cruise partners optimize their path to purchase.
Think back to your early days on the job. What surprised you or stood out to you most about Sojern’s culture?
I like how Sojern listens to individuals, takes feedback and acts upon it quickly. Since I started working at the company, we’ve made several updates on how Agile works better for our projects, and how product managers, engineers, applied scientists and analysts collaborate effectively to deliver projects toward unified goals.
We constantly identify improvement opportunities in our retrospective meetings and quickly make changes in how we work together in a better fashion. I feel very included at Sojern.
Sojern listens to individuals, takes feedback and acts upon it quickly.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and what skills did it help you develop?
I recently worked on a project which makes our search product more successful in terms of number of conversions and net revenue. I worked closely with product managers, analysts and engineers to analyze the data, design a solution, design requirements, implement the solution and see the impact of the project in one of our core products.
I enjoyed collaborating with several stakeholders and engineers in the projects. Not only did this project require collaboration, but it improved our communication, data science and engineering skills as well.
