Upstart

• Compensation is the only reason I do not give them one star.
• Remote work.
• Pretty diverse.

• Incredible amount of politics, process, and red tape for an engineering org on the smaller side
• Chaos. There were three re-orgs between Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. Actual madness. - High turnover is embraced. They will gladly let go of long time high performers with years of tribal knowledge and hire someone new with more experience. You eventually end up with a team where everyone has hardly any domain knowledge.
• Fear driven environment. You will hear performance mentioned every week in company comms and how they want everyone to be X% more productive with AI.
• Speaking of AI usage, they take it to the next level. Slack messages, Jira tickets, code, design documents. All made with AI. It will be the most overly verbose word slop you can think of and you'll get a pat on the back for being so thorough. My manager seriously told me how she just copied a technical design doc into ChatGPT and read that. Wild.
• Cutthroat. With the new focus on productivity gains and measuring performance with PR volume, LOC, and token usage, people hardly review PRs anymore because it gets them nothing. Be prepared to spend lots of time begging your team and other teams for reviews and then waiting. Unless you are good at playing politics and have the time / energy for it, I would avoid this place at all costs. If you are just looking for something short term that pays well and encourages you to use AI for any and everything, this place works well, just don't expect to stick around for long as you're considered a veteran at 2 years with all the turnover they have. I'm glad I left for something else when I did because I see on LinkedIn they've had more layoffs since.

Stop with the constant chaotic restructuring. Stop idolizing Amazon. And please stop trying to shove an LLM into everything, as it has its uses, but people are literally communicating back and forth through an LLM in Slack messages for everything.