Engineering at AngelList

We go to great lengths to understand the needs of our customers.

AngelList Venture exists to fuel more innovation in the world. We’re doing so by disrupting the venture capital industry and opening up a previously inaccessible asset class to a significantly wider set of people. In 2019, we spun out AngelList Venture into a separate company from AngelList to work on this problem and have since massively scaled up our core investing platform and launched several new products. These products include a new way for VCs to raise money, a new way for startups to provide liquidity for employees, and a new way for investors to have a diversified portfolio of high-quality deals and funds.

Focusing on our customers’ needs has helped us launch and scale quickly. We’re privileged to have a network of former founders and investors who are always sharing feedback and ideating with our team. We host UXR sessions (that engineers are welcome and encouraged to attend!) multiple times a week, where we solicit product feedback and listen to suggestions for improvement.

We're determined to create a product that transforms VC.

We’ve built a platform that allows accredited investors to invest in startups with just a few clicks of a button. In doing so, we’ve enabled a new generation of “solo capitalist” VCs, who are able to raise funds and start leading investment rounds into startups as individuals.

We encourage our team members to become investors themselves. We waive platform carry (fees) for our employees when they invest on our website, set up test accounts for employees to dogfood product flows, and provide networking opportunities for team members to start building relationships with the investor community directly.

We crave original ideas that can only come from a diverse team.

Our team works on the edge of VC, defining the future of the industry as a whole. To do this successfully, we constantly seek out original ideas. Doing so requires bringing a diverse set of people and backgrounds together – something we’re looking to improve on with our future hiring. Currently, our team members span the globe from Australia to California, New York, Colorado, India, Canada, and beyond. Some folks have kids (around 40% of the engineering team are parents) while others are just starting their careers. Whether you have a PhD in computer science or chemistry or are completely self-taught – we welcome all different types of backgrounds. Compensation is not based on your title, but rather on the impact you bring to the company. We’re also testing out an engineering fellowship model to work with more engineers who have non-traditional backgrounds.

When it comes to our product, we embrace our unique role and opportunity as an open venture platform in a historically exclusive industry. One of our four company values is “Build a Safe and Trusted Place for our Community.” In practice, we strive to keep AngelList open and inclusive to a broader set of investors and founders compared to other alternatives, which means we always prioritize the safety and trust of our users. We regularly ask ourselves: "Will this encourage more activity on our platform from new and existing investors or alienate them?" "Are we proud to put our name/brand behind this decision?" While we always champion bold ideas, we're mindful of making a positive contribution toward a future we want to live in.

You’ll work closely with people who know the industry well and are happy to share their knowledge.

We feel lucky to have a unique team comprised of former and future founders. Team members have raised venture funds, started and raised money for their own companies, been involved in acquisitions and IPOs, worked at early-stage startups that have become massive companies … the list goes on. While these credentials certainly aren’t required, it’s an added benefit that you’ll get to work closely with people who have a deep understanding of the industry and are excited to share their knowledge.

You can get to know our team members more here. If you’re hungry for ownership and looking to develop a career in the early-stage startup ecosystem, we’d love to hear from you!

As a company, we place a premium on clear and frequent written communication.

Since we’re a distributed team, we have developed most of our company processes to be remote first. We deprioritize email in favor of Slack and Notion – they’re way more collaborative.

Being able to capture one’s thoughts in writing is a revered and celebrated skill at AngelList. Our weekly team-wide standup is done exclusively through writing (yes, with more than 16 people in the meeting). Updates are written in Notion before the meeting starts and we spend the next 20-25 minutes reading and commenting on those updates, in silence. It’s surreal and almost comical the first time you experience it, but the value of the meeting is that all of the micro-interactions are covered in writing and folks who can’t make it because of the time zone (or life) can read it when they have a chance and gain close to 100% of the context.

We’re open in the way we share information and feedback with each other. We trust our employees – whether it’s our financial numbers (which are made public for everyone to see) or the reasoning behind an important business decision, we prioritize being open and transparent at all times. We encourage each other to share feedback early and often, and have spent time discussing how to give and receive feedback effectively.

Despite our remote-friendly processes, we value being able to spend time together. We typically host one offsite every year to bring the entire team together; previously we’ve gone to places like Thailand, Tulum, Colombia, and Hawaii.

We actively emphasize style consistency on both the frontend and backend.

As a team, we embrace automation, consistency, and simplicity:

• Automation – We rely heavily on automation to make our code and processes better. We use linting tools for styling automation, CD/CI for deployment automation, and Kubernetes for resiliency and host automation.
• Consistency – We have a documented style guide and component library that advises frontend development. Similarly, we have consistent styles and patterns we align and adopt on the backend. These are constantly iterated on, never stagnant.
• Simplicity – We’re a big believer in KISS and the principle of least astonishment. We treat our code like a product, with engineers being its users. As such, we try to optimize the design to match the user's experience, expectations, and mental models.

Our tech stack is optimized to be modern and easy to pick up, but not excessively flashy. We value new technologies when the benefits are clear, but being pragmatic is our number one priority. Some of the tools we use include:

• React because of its huge developer community and ease of use
• Rails because of its longstanding resiliency and friendly developer experience
• Typescript as a means to embrace type safety and keep sanity in check
• GraphQL because of its friendly developer experience

Ownership is a core part of an AngelList engineer’s DNA.

As a startup for startups, AngelList is a bit meta. Naturally, this attracts entrepreneurial engineers, who are interested in working outside the scope of traditional engineering roles. Folks who succeed at AngelList want to be full-stack and involved in more than just coding.

Engineers have the opportunity to drive business strategy and work closely with stakeholders in operations, sales, marketing, and legal. We don’t need to encourage engineers to own projects from start to finish because they actively embrace and seek out ways to do this themselves.

Projects are typically driven by a single engineer collaborating with a product manager and designer. Sometimes the engineer will PM the project themselves and other times they’ll design it themselves as well. It’s expected that this working team is able to drive projects from the inception of an idea all the way through execution and reflection.

We’re an action-oriented company of builders who enjoy rapidly iterating on new and existing ideas.

While venture capital typically moves at a snail’s pace, we’re the opposite. Our organization is composed of nimble, high-context teams that can operate autonomously without process getting in the way. We focus on what’s important and sweat the precise details that matter. This allows us to consistently ideate, validate, and execute on new concepts at a rapid pace.

Intrinsic drive, love of results, and a strong sense of founder mentality are traits commonly shared across the team. Nothing feels better than solving a customer’s (internal or external) problem within minutes of it being reported. We have a Slack channel called #v-product-feedback where people across the company post everything from bugs to copy suggestions, product improvement ideas, tooling improvement ideas, and more. Normally these get funneled into our product backlog, but sometimes engineers will jump in, take a suggestion, and drive a solution within the same day (or hour!) of it being posted. Talk about speedy!