Pros: - Good salary. They also offer a generous bonus at the end of the year, which is rare in this industry. - Tech stack is very interesting. You're gonna learn a lot of infrastructure as well as AI and data engineering if you end up in a good team. - People are very smart and in general very motivated. If you enjoy building cool stuff, this is the place to go.

Cons: - No flexibility in their hybrid policy: If you join Checkout, you must come 3 days per week in the office. There are some exceptions, i.e., if you are sick or for extraordinary causes. I really feel this policy hurts more than helps; most of the talent are going to competitors precisely for this reason, and for work/life balance, this is pretty bad. - Mandatory out-of-hours on-call. It is quite generous (50% of your hourly salary), however, if you are in a team with a lot of incidents (i.e., core teams), get yourself prepared. If you get an offer, make sure it's not a critical team to avoid this. - Perks are not really perks: they come as a deduction from your salary. For example, private health insurance. You need to sacrifice ~£100/month to get this "perk", as well as others, which I found a bit ridiculous. - The free lunches are terrible. Sorry, but it is the truth. I would suggest management radically change the free lunches approach and either offer vouchers to employees or a self-service catering like other tech companies do.

Pros: - Checkout threw money at tech, which means we worked with great tooling as there seemed to be no upper limit on spending. - Some extremely smart people were working in the company.

Cons: I can honestly say that checkout massively impacted my mental health in a negative way. There was a constant sense of frustration and tension across every team I spoke to. Managers didn't want to be managers in many cases, and very much so on my team. This meant that trying to progress was impossible, and there was no feedback after the last review I had before I left, even. The culture champs network was ineffectual and actually shut down on a global scale with "small targeted" teams of people at a local level, but literally nothing ever came of any meeting we ever had. There was a glass ceiling which was very apparent. Some of the more senior engineers in management were very obviously disdainful of teams they didn't see as "useful". Pretty terrible compensation on the whole. A fairly low base, which is compounded by salary brackets moving 3 times in the space of 1.5 years. Terrible diversity. Eighty percent of my working days were filled with stress and general team unhappiness. I actively dreaded going to work on Monday mornings, and I know I'm not the only one who felt like this, given the massive amount of people leaving at the same time as me.

Pros: Lots of work of all kinds. It's a good opportunity to work with some brilliant minds. Salary is similar to other companies that offer this kind of roles.

Cons: This is not an environment for people with work ethic or moral values. If you're a woman and especially a minority woman, you have zero chance of growth and development in tech. If you have a disability, same. It's all about who you know and if you're in the Boys Club. There is limited to no flexibility in terms of in-office days, even for people who are very new parents or pregnant women. There is no actual growth unless you're in with the "Club" - and even then there is a pecking order of the political game play. Growth has next to nothing to do with performance, so don't join expecting any.