DoorDash

There are some recent negative reviews here which I feel completely misrepresent the engineering org. Here's the truth:

Is there tech debt? Yes, a medium amount. I've also been in this industry for 10 years and I've seen truly bad tech debt where you have giant codebases with absolutely zero tests or monitoring. That is not the case here by any means.

Do not pay attention to people saying our code is "terrible" -- every codebase has terrible modules, but overall it's nothing out of the ordinary.

Truly smart people work in the engineering org. Everyone on my team is great - seriously, not a single slacker or incompetent team member. Even outside of my team, I interviewed with the guy who built the first version of DynamoDB (he now works at DoorDash!). We're working on really interesting problems involving distributed systems, machine learning, NLP, etc. You will learn and grow as an engineer if you work here and put in the effort to get to know some of the team, period.

Management is very respectful and has given me plenty of opportunities to work on high-profile projects, grow as an engineer, etc. I don't know why people complain about a lack of mentorship; I suspect those people just want someone to hold their hand and don't understand how to put in the work themselves. If you're a self-starter, you'll have no problem here.

I mean that, it really couldn't be easier to grow and move up the ranks. The first meeting I ever had with my manager involved them sitting down with me, going in-depth regarding my career goals, explaining exactly how to "level up" and what is expected of each level, plus what I should work on personally to get to the goals I was interested in. I've never had a company be that upfront about my performance and really try to understand my career goals - and this happens on a regular basis. This is great.

Again, a medium amount of tech debt. We're currently dedicating serious resources to fixing debt and improving system stability, so I'm happy with the way the management team is taking this, but we still have a ways to go here. I'm confident we'll fix the most glaring issues given a bit more time.

The CTO is pretty green all things considered. There's an active search for a VPE to fill in the gaps, and the pipeline is full of candidates, so I suspect this will improve very soon.

If you're not used to working at a startup, you will struggle here. Everyone is juggling multiple responsibilities and moving quickly. We have competition, and we have to beat the competition to win the space. It's a good problem to have, but also leads to some stressful situations on occasion -- nothing out of the ordinary for a high-growth company, but something to keep in mind.

Keep up the great work. Work on hiring a VPE who will help hasten the technical maturity we need to achieve as an organization.