Every engineering organization has its preferred tech stacks and sync-up structures. So what makes an engineering team truly stand out?
For engineers from 11 of NYC’s top growing companies, words like “progressive” and “engaging” can be used to describe their unique team cultures. And while each of them tackles different issues, they are all connected by a passion for their craft and the desire to drive their companies forward.
Whether they’re shaking up the insurtech space or reinventing the home renovation process, the city’s many tech stand-outs have plenty of open roles.
And don’t let these high-level ambitions fool you — there’s plenty of fun to go around at these companies. From holding cooking demos to arranging lunch outings, each of them offers plenty of opportunities for people to stay connected.
So whether you prefer the ELK Stack or consider yourself a Python purist, there’s a place for you at any one of these 11 growing tech companies across NYC.
What they do: Backed by MassMutual, Haven Life enables people to purchase life insurance online.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
Our tech stack consists of Node.js on the back end and Angular on the front end. We use AWS along with CloudWatch, Kubernetes for container orchestration, GraphQL for query and manipulation language, RabbitMQ for messaging queues, Kafka for event streaming and PostgreSQL for our database needs. We also use Docker for containerization, ELK Stack for search and analytics and GitLab for repository management with continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
One of my favorite tech tools we use is the ELK Stack, which helps us in searching, visualizing and analyzing customer queries and support issues easily. We also use TICK stack for platform monitoring and visualizing data through dashboards built by our team. Integrating Telegraf’s plugin StatsD with our existing platform, we send statistics to our current TICK infrastructure, which has been helpful in alerting us if a certain call started taking longer than usual. TICK has also been useful in alerting us when there is a high resource usage, which then leads us to spin up additional containers on the fly.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
Metadata is the core of the policy administration team. Metadata refers to a large amount of stored templates of information needed to properly configure, build and display an application to end users. Metadata is stored in JSON template format in our projects, which can become cumbersome for a non-developer to modify. To assist with the process of modifying metadata easily, we came up with a metadata editor tool. There were challenges with organizing metadata in a more readable format without compromising the response time for users and resolving conflicts if multiple people modify the same metadata at the same time, for instance.
What I enjoyed the most about this project was solving complex tree and graph problems, coming up with solutions around scalability as we load more metadata to the tool, and pair programming with colleagues.
Collaborating with my team on this project was a testament to the amazing teamwork that we have at Haven Life and was proof that, together, we go far. Everyone on the team pitched in and got their hands dirty, even if it meant doing something that wasn’t part of their day-to-day role.
Collaboration is the key tenet of our day-to-day operations at Haven Life.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
One of my favorite things about working at Haven Life is that I have the opportunity to learn and develop my skills while staying true to my personality. Collaboration is the key tenet of our day-to-day operations at Haven Life, whether it’s between various engineering teams or with customer success and product. This helps foster long-lasting partnerships across the company built on honesty, trust and quality.
What makes this job unique for me is the fact that I feel empowered to take part in design discussions, make high-level suggestions and present possible technical changes to the organization as part of our guilds. We have an extremely open, engaging and progressive office environment, which encourages healthy discussions and helps build strong teams. We have so many exciting office events and activities, one of which is being paired with people from various teams to grab lunch or explore the surrounding neighborhood with. All of this helps us get to know each other better.
What they do: Sisense offers business intelligence software that helps organizations prepare, analyze and visualize big or disparate datasets.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
My team primarily uses React, Typescript and Golang but other teams code in Javascript, Python, Java, Ruby and more. Our applications run in Kubernetes built on AWS and all developers are encouraged and empowered to be hands-on with the infrastructure that runs their code. My favorite tech tools that my team uses are the ones we build. We’re a data company so we use Sisense dashboards to validate hypotheses and make intelligent product decisions that are backed by data.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
I’m working on an application designed to monitor and control cloud-hosted Sisense deployments. It’s challenging for many reasons such as the sheer number of integrations with other services and the fact that, for many features, we’re automating processes that have been done manually behind the scenes by humans and putting direct control into customers’ hands. The data that we display needs to be accurate, actions need to be reliable and performance needs to be high. Our product is going to give customers visibility into and control over more than 500 deployments, so I enjoy solving complex problems knowing that the software we’re building has an eager user base ready to take advantage of new features right away.
I love gathering as a team to celebrate each week’s wins and see the talent and creativity of the folks around me on full display.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
My favorite company tradition is the Sisense Sizzle, which is a weekly gathering where folks from all departments get together to celebrate promotions, meet new hires, give each other shoutouts, and even face off in hilarious challenges like cook-offs, sumo wrestling and pie-eating contests. Anyone can pick a theme and host. I still have the Sisense-themed rap battle lyrics from a colleagues’ SNL-based Sizzle from a few weeks ago running through my head. I love gathering as a team to celebrate each week's wins and see the talent and creativity of the folks around me on full display.
What they do: Meetup’s platform helps people find and build local communities so they can meet new people, pursue their passions, find support and more.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
Meetup’s technology stack is very diverse and is fully hosted on the cloud. Since our company has been around since the early 2000s, our infrastructure includes programming languages in Java, Scala, Python, Jython, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node, Swift, Kotlin, GraphQL and more. Our web frameworks include React, Gatsby and NextJS and leverage modern design patterns for our solution architecture. We also use Github, Slack, Apollo, Datadog, PagerDuty and many AWS tools to carry out our work.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
The most interesting challenge for us continues to be the scale and magnitude of our platform. Fifty-four million people use Meetup in more than 193 countries worldwide. We translate the platform into dozens of languages. Our application is transaction-heavy and tailors the experience to each member. No problem is too small, as it affects the user experience for thousands or even millions of people. Our engineers learn a tremendous amount of knowledge about architecture design, performance and scale from our many internal specialists.
Our mission has always been the driving force for our team culture.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
Our mission has always been the driving force for our team culture. Empowering our members to make genuine human connections and build community at a time when so many people feel lonely and isolated has made us stronger. We’ve shared grief, joy, challenges and shifts in the way we work. Ultimately, it’s motivating to know that we are bringing people together not only on our platform but internally as well.
What they do: Block Renovation’s platform helps homeowners and builders tackle the home renovation process.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
We have a Node.js back end built with Typescript, Postgres and GraphQL that power a couple of different applications that use React or React Native, all of which run on top of AWS. We use Jira for project management, which I’m really enjoying right now. I’m also very excited to build out more tools with Datadog, which we use for observability and application performance monitoring. We also use tools like Figma, Whimsical and Loom to make cross-functional collaboration easier across distributed teams and time zones.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
The home renovation industry is one that’s poised for tech innovation. Currently, my team is working on a huge project around material procurement, order management and logistics. These projects were born out of business growth. As we now offer simultaneous renovations, we need greater control over supply chain timelines and catching material defects early so we can ensure high quality and on-time renovations. It’s always challenging to balance immediate deliverables with long-term growth and scale. I’m most excited to build clean, beautiful products that solve the many painful inefficiencies in the industry, which is a joyful experience for our internal and external customers. Not only have these problems been really interesting to solve, but it’s been really exciting and energizing to build something that has so much potential.
We have a really collaborative, solutions-oriented culture across the tech team.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
The majority of the engineering team is actually based out of Poland. Since the team is so distributed geographically, we work very asynchronously. Since Poland is six hours ahead of NYC, where most of the company is based, collaborative mornings are split throughout the day and there is a quieter heads-down time during the afternoons. We have a really collaborative, solutions-oriented culture across the tech team. And in engineering, we are all very deliberate about the choices we make and there is a consistent focus on quality and improvement.
What they do: Policygenius offers an online insurance marketplace that helps people understand their options, compare quotes and buy policies.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
My team’s core stack is built on a Ruby on Rails back end with a Postgres database and React front end that we’re in the process of converting to Typescript. We’ve also brought in Go for some of our microservices and have an automations pipeline running on Google Cloud Functions written in Python.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
One of the newer products we offer at Policygenius is accelerated underwriting, which is a no-medical exam life insurance option that cuts the months-long process of getting life insurance down to days. This new integration with life insurance carriers involved collecting, formatting and sending new data in a completely different process than our other life insurance products.
Part of our accelerated underwriting system relies on Google Cloud Functions connected by publish/subscribe topics, but we’re currently in the middle of integrating Google Cloud Workflows to improve that process. With Workflows, we’ll be switching our pub/sub-functions to HTTP, which will allow us to build up retry policies and a better application submission feedback system for our operations staff. Not only is this a new service integration for Policygenius but it’s also one of GCP’s newer product offerings, which has led to a lot of exciting and interesting discovery work.
You can always find a colleague willing to help solve problems or answer questions.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
At Policygenius, one of our core company values is “no chuckleheads allowed,” and that is especially visible among the engineering team. We’ve developed a highly collaborative environment where everyone is willing to pitch in and go the extra mile to get work done. You can always find a colleague willing to help solve problems or answer questions.
What they do: Addepar’s platform helps financial investors manage information.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
I work on the Addepar Content Aggregation Layer (ACAL) team. Our team’s goal is to redefine how Addepar manages its data. We are providing the data foundation to evolve the company’s current ETL processes and support new product offerings on the wealth of data we have.
To provide this foundation, the ACAL team needs to own multiple metadata stores to track what data the company has, what it looks like, its lineage and how this metadata changes over time. In order to build these metadata stores, the ACAL team built a code generation toolkit that lets teams easily spin up a “bitemporal database in a box.” The code generation toolkit takes a JSON document describing the data model and then code generates everything for the service. Some examples include an HTTP API and server stubs, asynchronous Kafka API, logging and audit.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
The most challenging project we’re working on is designing a system that catalogs, stores and publishes events for the data we receive or create. It’s challenging because it’s a critical piece of software for many of the overarching Addepar initiatives.
The system needs to reduce the cost of storing data, publish metadata-driven events to trigger new ETL processes, help us expand to a multi-region service model and support building new products on top of our existing data, among other things.
The fact that the system we’re building can have such an impact on the company and its future makes it extremely exciting to develop. We have stakeholders at all levels as well as organizations within the company rooting for the project’s success and helping where and when needed.
Having such diverse backgrounds empowers us to design thoughtful solutions to financial services problems.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
There’s a strong mix of coworkers from financial services backgrounds as well as from other industries. This blended environment allows us as engineers to try new concepts and break the mold of how things are done in financial services.
My team in particular uses this to our full advantage. The team has backgrounds in cloud SaaS technologies, large-scale e-commerce data pipelining, security research and financial services. Having such diverse backgrounds empowers us to design thoughtful solutions to financial services problems using the right amount of new and exciting technologies. This environment also makes tackling problems a team effort, as everyone has the background to contribute and create better solutions.
Overall, Addepar has provided us with the tools we need to help us get to know each other and familiarize ourselves with people on different teams throughout the company.
What they do: Click Therapeutics develops digital products designed to treat people suffering from various medical conditions.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
We use a modern tech stack. Most of our back-end code is written in Node.js and all of our user-facing applications are written in React. We use a containerized microservice architecture, in which services use gRPC and Envoy as sidecar proxy. Our infrastructure is exclusively on AWS. Some of the AWS services we use are RDS, ECS, EC2, SES, Route 53, Lambda and Cloudformation, while our stack templates are written in Python. We use Relational database and NoSQL depending on the use case.
Some of my favorite tools are gRPC protobufs, which makes the API interface super easy to look up, in addition to Datadog, which is immensely helpful in searching logs and setting up automated tests.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
I am currently building a module in our continuous integration process that automatically uploads our documentation to an internal website, which helps our engineers understand the architecture for any part of the code. This is a part of the bigger project of establishing our technical documentation in a centralized and accessible location. The additional goal of this project is to make sure that we provide easy and swift onboarding for new engineers.
I enjoy working on challenging projects. What I like a lot about this project, in particular, is that we need to build an abstract feature into our CI process so that it works for every part of our code while making sure that this feature supports any future documentation we write.
Our teams are extremely close-knit, which helps us collaborate in productive ways and learn from each other.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
We take pride in our meaningful mission, which is to build prescription medical treatments for our users. We are passionate about building a first-class experience for our users and thrive upon perfecting our products in every way possible. Our teams are extremely close-knit, which helps us collaborate in productive ways and learn from each other. We have created our development processes in such a way that it builds confidence in the product we ship and helps us achieve our goals as quickly as possible. Our policies are directed toward spending as little time in meetings as possible so that we can maximize our decisiveness. We also take into consideration the engineers’ desired career paths to make sure they are happy with what they work on.
I think the best part about being an engineer at Click is that we are given many opportunities to lead challenging projects, which has helped me grow immensely in my career.
What they do: Capitalize’s platform helps people save money for retirement.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
We’re an agile development shop that’s focused on reactive microservices. We’ve been pretty keen on some of the modern MicroProfile, cloud-based frameworks such as Quarkus and we really think there are some fantastic language constructs with Kotlin. We’ve also been experimenting with native image building using GraalVM. Our goal is a tight, concise and high-performing code base that can grow with our ambitions without becoming arcane and monolithic.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
While you can send cash, make options calls and manage nearly any financial transaction from your computer or phone, consolidating and optimizing your retirement accounts generally still involves lengthy paperwork, phone calls, paper checks and even faxes.
We’ve built a tool to help people automatically locate their old 401(k)s instantly by just typing in an employer name. This removes the need for digging around for old statements or having your previous employer send potentially awkward calls to HR. We’ve aggregated over 700,000 employer records, which cover over 70 million people. We are looking to enrich this with additional information to cover as many people and companies as we can. Many people may not have an IRA or may find it challenging to find the best IRA for them. That’s why we’ve also built an algorithm that helps users compare, select and open an IRA at leading institutions based on their preferences.
We’ve just scratched the surface of what technology can do and we have an ambitious roadmap that will have a significant impact on a lot of people.
We empower everyone on our team to move quickly, try new experiments, learn from them and then repeat that process.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
We work hard for each and every one of our customers regardless of how much money is in their accounts. We believe we can help people and generate revenue without profiting at their expense. We do this because it’s the right thing to do, and in earning their trust, we can provide long-term help. We all operate with a sense of ownership, giving people the power to bring up creative, ambitious ideas, make decisions and hold themselves accountable for their own work. We empower everyone on our team to move quickly, try new experiments, learn from them and then repeat that process.
What they do: CLEAR creates touchless ID applications powered by biometrics for use in spaces such as airports and stadiums.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
I work on one of the core platform back-end teams, which generally build Java microservices that run in Docker containers hosted on Kubernetes. For communication, we support both representational state transfer and GraphQL for our synchronous needs along with events over Kafka.
The great thing about working at CLEAR is that while the above is the “norm” for our back-end systems, each team is empowered to choose the right stack that works best for them. Language-wise, I’ve seen GoLang, Groovy, Python and Kotlin being used. Also, since we’re an AWS shop, we have all that they provide at our disposal. All of these options are great because they allow us to pick the right tools for the job.
Because I enjoy trying new languages and architectures, I would say my favorite tech tools are the self-service tools provided by our infrastructure and build integration and tools (BITs) teams. It seems like they are always releasing a new pipeline, Terraform module, or otherwise, that empowers engineers to safely provision, administer or gain insight into what we are running.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
The most interesting project I’ve been involved with is standing up and fine-tuning our metrics and observability implementation. At CLEAR, we’ve always placed emphasis on reporting and making sure our leaders have the information they need to make decisions. But sometimes what the code was doing was opaque. To fix this, we’ve been working to bring the same mentality to a lower level by providing real-time application metrics in a format that is useful without being overwhelming.
I’ve had a lot of fun working on this because it has given us great insight into how our applications actually work. We’ve been able to use these metrics to fine-tune our code and preemptively fix bugs before they cause issues. Rather than being alerted on every anomaly, we’re using observability tools to detect issues based on patterns, error rates and more.
In our engineering organization, we foster a culture of ownership.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
In our engineering organization, we foster a culture of ownership. If you write the code, you own the testing, documentation, deployment and maintenance of it. While this benefits us with clean code and robust automated testing suites, it also prevents firefighting from taking time away from delivering features or paying down technical debt.
In past organizations, on-call support means getting paged every night, sometimes multiple times. At CLEAR, we groom our user stories with enough time for engineers to make sure their code is solid and the error cases are handled either automatically, with a failover, or through documented manual steps before they deploy to production. This organically results in a lower volume and decreased severity of incidents, fewer pages to engineers and a higher quality product for our members.
What they do: Collibra’s data intelligence cloud enables organizations to unlock the value of their data.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
The organization’s interest in and commitment to using and contributing back to Cloud Native Computing Foundation technologies like Kubernetes, Helm, Argo and CloudEvents makes for a pretty dynamic environment.
Much of the core of the application tech stack is Java and Spring but there is also some Node.js and React on the front end, OpenAPI and some GraphQL for APIs and Postgres for persistence, which is always a personal favorite. I’m particularly looking forward to the new CYCLE clause in Postgres 14.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
From an operational perspective, mapping out deployment footprints for a multi-cloud architecture with compelling business drivers can have some challenging moments but it’s also pretty fun.
One of the problems the company as a whole is trying to solve is one that a lot of engineers have likely run into in one way or another: “Where is my data, how do I get it, and what does it all mean?”
This is a challenge technical people run into every day. We want to make data-driven decisions but to drive those decisions we need the confidence that we have the actual information we want. Figuring out how best to solve this problem and make that solution trivial is something that is immensely satisfying for both our customers and our company.
Mapping out deployment footprints for a multi-cloud architecture with compelling business drivers can have some challenging moments but it’s also pretty fun.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
One unique aspect of our company culture is that nearly everyone here is a foodie. The dedicated Slack channel, the cooking demos and the recipes are great. A word to the wise: When the chief information security officer starts streaming cooking demos, make the time. The results are routinely fantastic.
What they do: BCG Digital Ventures is a branch of Boston Consulting Group that focuses on corporate innovation and digital business-building.
What are some of your favorite tech tools your team is using?
We’re excited to regularly explore new and emerging technology stacks in different ventures along with tried and true languages and frameworks. A sample of the software engineering technologies our ventures have used in the past year include Java, Python, .NET, React, AWS and Azure, in addition to emerging technologies such as IoT sensors, computer vision and blockchain. With people working remotely, we also frequently leverage collaboration tools such as Slack, Miro, Airtable and Zoom.
What’s the most interesting or challenging project you’re working on right now, and what do you enjoy most about it?
I’ve had the opportunity to work on a venture in the fintech space over the last 15 months and I hope that we’ll be able to talk more about it publicly in the coming months. We’re proud to be actively working on ventures that support the underbanked while raising the bar for mainstream financial products in the consumer and commercial spaces.
Our engineering team is full of people that love engineering as a craft but also see it as part of our larger goal of building game-changing businesses.”
What’s something unique about your team from other engineering orgs you’ve been part of?
Our engineering team is full of people that love engineering as a craft but also see it as part of our larger goal of building game-changing businesses. It’s just as important that our engineers have strong technical chops as it is that they communicate and collaborate well with our non-technical team.
