Checkr

The technical level of my colleagues was high. I learned a lot from the people I worked with, and they were the main reason to stay.

The problems are genuinely hard and interesting. The business model and the industry impose real constraints around scale, data quality, and compliance, so the engineering work has substance.

The benefits package is competitive on paper. The caveat is that several benefits vest with tenure, and with the current turnover in the office not everyone sticks around long enough to use them.

The problems in this office don't come from the team or the product. They come from local engineering leadership.

Over the past period, the Santiago office lost several senior engineers and managers, mostly from terminations. Engineering leadership never explained those departures to the rest of the team, and never addressed what they mean for workload or technical continuity. The lack of transparency isn’t a one-off; it’s the pattern.

Open Q&A forums exist, but local leadership uses them to manage frustration rather than answer it. Questions about termination criteria, technical direction, and priorities get generalities: no owner, no date, no follow-up. The same issues were raised for months without producing a single concrete action.

The leadership style is top-down and built around one person's preferences, with very little tolerance for disagreement. In my experience, raising a technical or organizational objection directly was treated as an attitude problem rather than as useful information. Predictably, people stopped saying what they thought, which cost leadership the exact signal it needed.

Technical and organizational blockers reported by the teams were neither resolved locally nor escalated upward. When leadership filters what goes up, the rest of the company never learns there's a problem.

The result is persistently low morale and avoidable attrition. The talent and the interesting problems are there; what's missing is leadership capable of supporting them.

This is a local leadership problem, and it gets fixed by looking at it directly. Explain departures to the team. Answer hard questions with data and verifiable commitments. Evaluate Santiago's engineering leadership on retention, morale, and the quality of what it escalates upward, not only on delivery. And open a feedback channel that doesn't run through the direct reporting line: as long as the only way to report the problem goes through the person causing it, you won't hear about it.