In industries ranging from big data to customer relationship management, these four San Francisco-based companies are offering golden opportunities in the Golden City, expanding quickly and hiring across departments.
Home to storied Silicon Valley, the Bay Area has long served as a reputable center of fast-growing, innovative tech startups. For some, the allure of working in San Francisco alongside talented developers and eager engineers may draw them to the tech hub. As more companies shift to remote-first teams, candidates now also have the unique opportunity to work at some of these promising San Francisco-based startups without living in the Bay Area.
Operations and engineering leaders at these four featured companies were excited to share about their workplaces’ game-changing projects — such as Braze’s Volunteer Week and Poggio Labs’s Stripe data connector integration. They also discussed unique company benefits, including Airbyte’s international travel perks and Slab’s flexible wellness stipend.
It’s hard to go wrong at any of these innovative companies, which are hiring in engineering, design, sales, product, marketing, data, operations and more.
Built In San Francisco connected with operations and engineering leaders from Braze, Airbyte, Poggio Labs and Slab to learn more about what drove them to join their companies — and what compels them to stay.
Senior People Operations Manager Jennyfer Phan says the number one reason to join Braze, a customer engagement platform for brands, is the intelligent, kind people who work there. Keeping with the company’s core value of “be a human,” Phan recently organized Volunteer Week, a global initiative during which Braze employees gave back to their communities by participating in donation drives, cleaning up local parks, volunteering with elementary students and more.
What were the key drivers in your decision to join your company and stay?
The people at Braze — from my colleagues to our company leaders — are the main drivers behind my five and a half years at the company. I work with intelligent people whom I continue to learn from and collaborate with every day. Working with them has been a huge part of my career growth because they’re always pushing and challenging me.
Back in our early startup days, when I was an office manager, I would tap a colleague who was in sales on the shoulder to help me install TVs in our conference rooms. Neither of us knew what we were doing, but we had the mentality that we could figure it out together. While it was challenging, it was amazing to see people who are not on the same team as you still willing to help, even though it’s not in their job description.
One of our company values at Braze is “be a human.” Each of us contributes to the Braze culture through our individuality. We operate with integrity and, above all else, we are kind. They are more than just coworkers, and I’ve been fortunate to build strong relationships with these folks that make me look forward to each workday. As we continue to grow as a company, our strong culture of community only gets better with time.
As we continue to grow as a company, our strong culture of community only gets better with time.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
Recently, I coordinated Volunteer Week, a global initiative during which Braze provides employees opportunities to give back to the community via volunteerism or a donation drive.
Running this global initiative helped me strengthen many skills I need for my day job, such as understanding our employees and their interests, learning the best ways to communicate with them, managing global events with different time zones and cultures, and being able to think on my feet. Planning this event in June for locations like New York and London can be a challenge; one day, the forecast says it’s going to be sunny and beautiful, and the next one shows it’s raining. I learned to always have plans B and C at all times, just in case.
At the end of the day, it’s amazing to see the impact our teams have when they’re participating in these events, whether it’s working with fifth graders, sharing their life experiences with college students or cleaning up a local park. It’s so fulfilling to lead an initiative bigger than just our day-to-day responsibilities by making a difference in the world.
At Airbyte, an open-source data integration startup, Engineering Manager Sherif Nada innovates with hyper-productivity in mind, invoking the engineering value that “a task that took a week last year should take 10 minutes this year.” Outside of working in Airbyte’s dynamic and fast-paced environment, employees enjoy the company’s “travel with purpose” benefit, where people can work and connect with colleagues in any country in the world.
What were the key drivers in your decision to join your company and stay?
I’ve been at Airbyte for more than two years. I joined as the first employee because I wanted to experience a startup in its earliest possible stage. I considered founding, but ultimately decided to join Michel Tricot and John Lafleur in Airbyte because I strongly believed in their vision and ability to build an amazing company and team.
The number one reason I’ve stayed at Airbyte is that the work is incredibly fast-paced and conducive to growth. For example, my role at the company has changed roughly every three to six months. I initially worked across the entire product as an individual contributor, then built our Connector Development Kit and bootstrapped our first two connector implementations teams, the connectors engineering org and the connector extensibility engineering team. Each of these involved very different challenges and was a super rewarding experience.
Along the way, I was supported by incredible team members and the founders. Our customers and community gained so much value from the work we do and unlocked a lot of use cases. Our company culture is fantastic; it emphasizes transparency, time leverage, focus and many other wonderful values. Putting these things together, it’s been fairly easy to stay.
The number one reason I’ve stayed at Airbyte is that the work is incredibly fast-paced and conducive to growth.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently?
The coolest project I recently worked on is what we’re calling “Declarative Connectors.” We’re building a framework for creating fully featured, high-quality integrations with REST APIs in less than one hour by declaratively specifying the connector’s behavior via YAML rather than writing imperative Python or Java code for the integration.
To enable this project, we surveyed hundreds of REST APIs, built really powerful abstractions for connecting to them and packaged them in developer-friendly tooling that a developer can use to get started in an afternoon. This is a huge productivity boost, and is exemplary of my favorite engineering value: “Build leverage: a task that took a week last year should take 10 minutes this year.”
What’s your favorite perk or benefit your company offers?
My favorite perk is by far “travel with purpose.” This is a benefit where you can travel to work and connect with coworkers anywhere in the world, even in a country where neither of you live. I’ll be honest, I’m a frugal person and I was skeptical this was worth the cost, especially in this economy! However, it’s offered amazing returns on productivity and company bonding, and I’ve visited some amazing places.
Senior Software Engineer Peter Tuan was drawn to Poggio Labs, a customer relationship management software company, after witnessing the success it achieved in its first year. Now, he is excited to stay at the remote-first company because of its great results and product-market fit, along with his supportive manager and ambitious team.
What was the key driver in your decision to join your company?
The key driver for me was seeing the amount of traction that Poggio built in its first year of operation. Having worked across company sizes — from early stages (seed/Series A), to mid stages (self-sustainable) to a very large, well-established financial tech company — I realized that what my college friend, CEO Matt Slotnick, was achieving with the Poggio team was not normal.
After joining the company and being here for the past few months, I’ve witnessed the incredible talent and ambition of the team, along with the powerful results that come about when those two are brought together in the dynamics of every participant. I stay to witness what these forces can compound into and become; and it’s just nice to have product-market fit this early.
I’ve witnessed the incredible talent and ambition of the team, along with the powerful results that come about when those two are brought together in the dynamics of every participant.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
The coolest project I worked on recently was leading our Stripe data connector integration. This allows any one of our customers who use Stripe for billing to be able to automatically populate their customer relationship management software with all their accounts and potentially relevant Stripe metrics such subscription status, plan, product, billing interval and usage.
There’s a magic to adding a new feature set or data connector in Poggio because of how it flows and activates other parts of the application, with everything seamlessly coming together. For example, if Google Workspace is connected, those accounts created from Stripe will then create or tie related contacts from your emails and Slack up to the user interface, which gets dynamically hydrated.
My manager is also pretty awesome. She shares a lot of stories from her life and offers practical advice on how we can grow professionally, without adding any pressure to do so. I keep her recommendations open in a separate tab to refer to daily. I’m not Type A or hypercompetitive, and I will only pursue career growth if it’s fun and fulfilling; Poggio offers that.
At Slab, a knowledge-sharing platform for companies, Operations Lead Rebecca Acree says teams work on challenging problems with a lot of autonomy. Her favorite benefit at the fully remote company is its flexible monthly wellness stipend, which allocates $150 for employees to spend on anything from gym memberships to massages and Starbucks.
What were the key drivers in your decision to join your company and stay?
I joined Slab for the opportunity to make a big impact and punch above my weight, and that’s why I’m still here a few years later. With a super smart and intentionally lean team, I get to work on hard problems with a lot of autonomy, and I’m challenged to improve the rigor of my thinking and decision making on a daily basis.
I joined Slab for the opportunity to make a big impact and punch above my weight, and that’s why I’m still here a few years later.”
What’s your favorite perk or benefit your company offers, and why?
Benefits at Slab are designed to be flexible and practical — what people actually want and will use. They’re all great for that reason, but the wellness stipend is my favorite. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach like a gym membership, Slab employees get $150 per month to spend however they like, on whatever wellness means to them. I’ve used it for everything from my daily Starbucks habit to massages!
