Engineering at Indent

Feedback is a gift.

At Indent, our focus is on human-centric problem solving. Whether it’s an engineer who needs access to a cloud storage bucket for 30 minutes – or the admin on the other end who needs to make sure the right people have access for the correct amount of time – our goal is to package different data privacy solutions to meet our clients’ specific needs. We want to be able to scale to the largest Fortune 500 companies and eventually also meet the needs of smaller companies like your local dental office. That’s why regular and open feedback about our product and business is so crucial to our growth. We view all forms of feedback from teammates, customers and the market, as a gift that both leads and motivates us to improve.

We’re looking for team-members who focus on the evolution of an idea to the final product, and can easily share their thoughts in real-time. In return, we promise to give consistent, candid feedback as well.

Trade-offs: We’d rather get raw feedback at the earliest stage of a project than wait to present an entirely polished end result. When receiving difficult feedback, we try to look for the productive takeaways and lessons learned for next time.

The process is the product.

We’re committed to bringing on the best talent and fostering employee growth internally. Yes, our postings are “jobs,” but we want them to be in the bigger landscape of a career. To that end, we’ll talk about performance plans as early as the interview and hiring process and be explicit in setting expectations.

Our feedback structures are designed to make sure we’re hearing from you regularly. In addition to stand-ups and weekly all-hands, you can expect weekly or biweekly 1-on-1s to ensure you’re tracking toward your personal and professional goals. More formal 360 reviews via Lattice also allow for feedback in all directions.

As co-founders, we (Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie) bring a vast amount of experience. Fouad worked on data infrastructure at Segment (he also has experience in recruiting) and Dan was the first non-Googler to manage a Kubernetes release. While our backgrounds are unique, both of us have worked at companies where we felt a lack of empowerment. We’re now determined to make sure that as Indent grows, not only is every employee able to participate, but they are also actively listened to with the same respect as a founder.

Trade-offs: We’d rather get policies in place for SOC 2 that enable us to build deeper trust with our customers than just race to tack on new features. We believe that sustainable progress is only possible through a sustainable process.

“The cost of failure is education.” – Devin Carraway, Google SRE Handbook

We’ve learned the most from our failures. We’ve had companies, products, and projects all fail and they’ve been some of our most impactful learning experiences. Making mistakes has allowed us to become more thoughtful and intentional about our decisions, including carefully thinking about roles before we post them. We’ve found when a project fails, it’s not any one person’s fault, but rather mismanaged expectations or a misalignment/misappropriation of resources. Only in an environment where you fail enough to learn – but not so much that you feel ineffective – will you be successful.

We want Indent to be a warm place, where you can feel safe, do your best work, and feel good about what you do. This means being able to take risks and learning how you can iterate and improve moving forward.

Trade-offs: We lean toward failing early and often to learn what we need to make the next iteration successful, rather than risk going too deep on a shaky foundation that can lead to a significant opportunity cost. There are certain problems that require a correct answer on the first try and we try to distinguish if it’s a “one-way door” or a decision we can approach iteratively.

We’re careful not to praise over-working.

Everyone has their own preferences for when and how they work best. We have team-based standups at the beginning of the week (i.e. engineering or product) and a company-wide all-hands at the end of the week. Beyond that, it’s up to teams to self-organize. Even once we’re a much larger company, we want each team to create a personalized meeting schedule based on team members’ needs and preferences, with a few exceptions of timezone-friendly company-wide events. Generally speaking though, we want you to work whenever that makes sense for you.

Having experienced burnout before firsthand (a topic Dan is especially happy to discuss), we’re really careful not to praise over-working. We are well aware that, sometimes, people are motivated to stay late and work long hours. We certainly won’t discourage anyone to stop working when inspiration strikes, but we also don’t expect this type of behavior. We want everyone we work with to feel energized at work and also have time for their out-of-the-office hobbies. Whatever your passions are outside of work, we want you to enjoy them! (For Fouad, that means trying new recipes. He loves to cook!)

Trade-offs: We believe people are most productive when they’re fulfilled during and outside of work, and that starts with having enough time to enjoy life away from the computer. There will be an endless stream of important tasks and it’s our responsibility as a team to identify the few truly urgent issues from the ones that we can pick up as a group on Monday.

We see ourselves as denizens of a broader community.

As a company, we want to recognize the role tech plays in a greater context and create inclusive communities both internally and for our customers. We identify as denizens – part of the local and national community – working to protect privacy by making data access safe and secure for everyone. While this is our company’s mission and focus, we also want to do more. As a team, we commit time and effort to initiatives to help people vote, help run infrastructure for COVID-19 research, and have thoughtful company holidays like Election Day.

Our dedication to serving our greater community is something we’ve bonded over. Before we worked together on Indent, we collaborated on privacy-first tools to help people find their polling place and a ballot tool that encrypted your data so no one else could see your ballot. We helped around 3 million people get out to vote with Vote.org in 2018. While we’re no longer working on voter participation tools, this experience served as a launching point for how we can make products and decisions that align our business initiatives with meaningful improvements to the privacy of so many people.

Trade-offs: As a team, we participate in our communities and do what we can to advocate for accessible privacy as a right. We see our product as the sum of our abilities, perspectives, and beliefs to help restore trust in tech.

We’re intentional about growth.

After some early lessons from our last companies (like an office we barely used), we’ve been very judicious with our spending. By keeping the team small until now, we were able to validate customer problems in tight iteration loops. We’ve talked to dozens of companies, ranging from fast-growing startups with a few hundred employees to Fortune 500 companies with tens of thousands of employees, who are all experiencing the same problems at different scales.

We’re excited to tackle these challenges, build platforms that will enable us to solve increasingly complex problems, and grow a team of passionate folx to do it. Over the next few months, we’re planning to hire infrastructure engineers, product engineers, and designers. If that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!

We’re building something new.

As of now, we speak directly with customers to hear their pain points and it’s a collaboration internally to distill the product change. We don’t currently have a PM and it is very possible we won’t until well into 2021, which means every engineer who joins our team should not expect every component of the task to be defined by someone else. You won’t have to act as a PM, but you should be ready to act like a tech lead in your area, understanding the bigger context and how what you build will impact other systems, dependencies and customers. You’ll also be able to point to specific, high-impact things that did not exist until you helped create them.

A big part of making start to finish ownership run smoothly is documentation. On every call with a customer, we’ll get to know what their issues are and take notes, which we then share during all-hands. Tasks are created in JIRA so we have written documentation and engineers will be responsible for moving that task toward a given milestone and completion date. We’ll create a Notion doc and discuss on Slack or Zoom to set expectations clearly and share any roadblocks.

We’re not just using the best-in-class technologies, we’re actively innovating and building on them.

Our infrastructure is orchestrated using Kubernetes, and is crucial to everything we do. We also use Cadence, Presto, and Flink for core functions of our system. You can listen/read about all of the details on our tech on our Software Engineering Daily podcast interview!

Ultimately, our goal is to create capabilities based on these tools that solve our customers’ problems in unique and specialized ways. Using cutting-edge technologies allows us to do so in a stress-free way; we can have predictable releases and build a lot of trust with our processes when we’re not getting slowed down by tech that’s constantly breaking or doesn’t work.