Plaid

• Highly engaged and accessible senior leadership. C-suite makes themselves available for questions from anyone and answers them thoughtfully and honestly.

• Strong transparency. People answer hard questions honestly, and strategic company details are not just accessible but actively broadcasted.

• Well-thought-out culture. Company emphasizes openness, empowerment, social support, growth, and learning.

• Strategic, focused organization. Lots of prioritization going on, and the company feels really in it to build far-and-away the best Open Banking technology out there, and teams think hard about how their work fits into the organization's goals and strategy. I don't mean just nice paper stuff; I mean the company really thinks about and gets ahead of its hurdles instead of handwaving them again. There's a strong sense of purpose and direction.

• Strong future: Open Banking/fintech is expected to boom even further, and Plaid is at the forefront, and if you look at publicly available information and analyses of Plaid's future, paired with the company's culture, priorities, and hiring bar, you might find yourself quite optimistic about Plaid's future. Knock on wood, but stonks only go up!

• Individualized career growth attention and performance reviews.

• Company rewards being thoughtful.

• Lots of things to do. The transparency means a lot of information. The impactful work means a lot of prioritization and skimming. You have to get really good at staying focused on priorities and cutting out secondary needs, even when they're enjoyable or pressing.

• Growing pains. Both technically and organizationally, Plaid is growing fast right now. This means some things are in flux.

• Empowerment means responsibility. You're expected to really take ownership and find opportunities to contribute impactfully. I've never worked anywhere where "you own your career" has rang truer than at Plaid.

• Lots of keep-the-lights-on work; and some teams and Engineering Managers have a lot on their plate.

• Company is super-social. You need to get used to talking to people, asking questions, etc., as a primary learning strategy. Formal processes and tools get a lot of love, but they don't keep up with the growth nearly as well as people do. So you gotta really embrace 1:1's and coffee chats.

Focus on alleviating the load on Engineering Managers and on-calls. Lots of undesirable downstream effects follow when they get put under stress, and dependencies clog up.