Pros
If you’re early-to-mid career and want breadth, you’ll get it. Small team means real ownership. I led monorepo adoption, CI/CD pipeline design, and built a revenue-generating integration platform largely end to end with my team. The work itself was interesting, and you’ll gain genuine architectural experience faster than at a larger company.
One genuine bright spot: the people. My direct teammates and immediate managers were some of the best I’ve worked with. Talented, collaborative, and genuinely good humans. The frustrations here are not with them. The problems live higher up the chain.
Cons
Career growth is effectively nonexistent. After five years and multiple major technical initiatives, a promotion proposal I put together went nowhere.
No criteria, no timeline, no honest conversation. Just silence.
Don’t mistake ownership of hard work for a path forward; those are two separate things here.
The deeper dysfunction is the culture of performative product development. Product and Sales routinely drive engineering efforts aimed at checking boxes for Gartner analyst mentions or propping up renewal pitches, not serving actual customers. Features get scoped, resourced, built, and shipped. Then the moment the sales cycle closes, they’re abandoned. No follow-up, no iteration, no investment. The work exists to say “we have it,” not to actually build something useful.
After a few years you realize a meaningful chunk of your output is slide deck ammunition, not product development. That’s demoralizing for engineers who take their craft seriously.
The company also appears to be pivoting away from its domestic engineering talent, significantly in favor of offshore resources. The people who built the platform are being treated as a cost line to cut.