Arista Networks

I love working here. OS and Networking are my passion, and there are a lot of companies to work for.

Here are the things I like best about the Arista software team:

• No titles; we're all software engineers. We don't have to deal with the politics of a senior engineer or technical lead telling a software engineer what to do based on rank. A natural hierarchy evolves where engineers who are very skilled in specific areas are considered the authority on a topic.
• Package-based system. Modeled after the Linux community, each package has a team of maintainers for that code. Anyone can submit changes to any package, and the maintainers do the code reviews for their packages. No one discourages others from modifying their code.
• Incredibly smart people
• SF office
• Great equity upside
• Great set of tools
• No QA team. We use continuous integration with automatic testing to prevent regressions at merge time.
• Encouraged to learn different things. I maintain parts of the code and am also free to work on different areas. I work on device firmware, kernel code, and user-space C++ and Python.

Salaries are lower than established public networking companies. When I took the job, I had offers with higher salaries, but Arista had the better equity upside and learning potential.

• Keep the hiring bar high.
• Continue to empower engineers as we grow. We've converted engineers to new layers of management, and so far, that has worked well and not gotten in the way of my work.