Engineering Team at Meadow

Ensuring personal growth and time to refuel is the core of our ethos.

Every member of the team at Meadow chooses to be here everyday, and we ensure that our own personal growth and happiness comes first. Typically, engineers will work around 35-40 hours per week and choose which hours work best for them. Some of us come in at 9am, while others come in closer to 11am, or later. If you feel like working at home, we strongly encourage you to! Quality work at the time that works best for you is all that matters.

We genuinely believe people produce their best work when they’re able to be the best versions of themselves. We want our team members to nourish their other passions and interests. As an example, James and Rick both love skiing in the winter. They will work remotely for various weeks, ski during the day, and then work in the off hours or on a day in between.

Also, instead of having an “unlimited” vacation policy, which we think encourages less vacation, we have a 25 days paid plan. Each year, every team member is expected to use those five weeks to take time off and recharge. You can break them up or take 5 consecutive weeks off – it’s up to you!

Engineers write code for the backend, frontend, and help define the roadmap.

We encourage and support our engineers to work on projects across all of our products. One week you may help spec out a new feature and develop the API endpoints. Another week, you may be wiring up the redux actions and creating the react components. You will get the opportunity to work on systems that impact our customers and learn new technologies in the process.

Our clients place their trust in us to build the best product for cannabis.

Each and every day, thousands of cannabis retail transactions are processed using our software. Without our product, our clients would be less efficient, non compliant, and unable to operate. Going forward, our vision places Meadow software at each stage of the cannabis supply chain: all the way from when it is grown to when it is sold in a retail environment or an online ecommerce store.

Gathering customer feedback is an integral part to our development process. Every two weeks, our Sales, Customer Success and Engineering teams come together to discuss client feedback and changes to the roadmap. We are looking for engineers who enjoy working on a product that its users truly depend on to operate their business. Every decision we make can have a huge positive impact on our clients’ business.

We help grow and strengthen many facets of the Cannabis Community.

Over the past few years, we have held over 100 events for the cannabis community. We’ve run events to help educate our partners and the cannabis community about new regulations, and held seminars on how to grow a business efficiently. Cannabis to us is much more than our line of work, it is a movement. We are one small part, but believe we can have a big impact.

The cannabis community is large and multi-faceted. We are members of The California Growers Association, The California Cannabis Industry Association, The California Distribution Association, The Minority Cannabis Business Association, The Drug Policy Alliance, NORML, Americans for Safe Access, The United Cannabis Businesses Association, The San Francisco Cannabis Retailers Alliance, and many more. We do our best to continue learning and sharing our knowledge and experience with our colleagues.

One of the most impactful events we’ve hosted is Meadowlands, a 3-day retreat in the redwoods of Mendocino at Camp Navarro. We had over 350 attendees, and speakers included local and state regulators and operators across the supply chain.

Meadow’s software is mission critical for each and every one of our clients.

Our retail clients include small mom-and-pop delivery services, large dispensary brands with multiple locations, and everything in between. Our Sales and Customer Success teams receive feedback everyday from each type of client. Every two weeks, our Sales, Customer Success and Engineering Teams get together for a product meeting to discuss the feedback and how it should affect our roadmap. For larger projects, our team makes in-person visits to our clients to understand the in-and-outs of their processes. Only with better insights on how our clients do business can we design a better, more efficient product for them to use.

We enjoy learning and utilizing the latest technologies to improve our product and process.

Our stack uses Node.js, React, Redux, Swift, and Postgres. On the backend, our API uses Koa, which is the modern successor to express that utilizes async/await. This has allowed us to make our software development faster and simplify the code while reducing tech debt. Our frontend utilizes React + Redux, and we actively encourage experimenting with new and upcoming frontend technologies.

We encourage experimentation and look forward to the new tools we can implement in the coming years.

Our product appears simple, but it supports complex processes through innovative interfaces.

Many of the problems our product solves for our clients involve complex real-world processes. For example, our clients receive their inventory from a distributor, and they must track it in real time through various physical spaces and whom it is sold to. We have been able to accomplish this through great, innovative design and engineering from our team. Our clients have told us repeatedly how simple our product is to use and how much better it has been for them since implementation.

Engineers own features from the first line of code to deployment.

We encourage and support our team to be involved with every feature starting from the first idea. We often work in pairs with one person working on the backend API, and the other implementing the react components or new swift code for our iPad point of sale. During the process, we work closely together to support each other's needs and make changes. For example, we just deployed multi-location real-time inventory tracking. While developing all the frontend capabilities, multiple problems were solved by having an open communication dialogue and modifying the API portion to better support the clients.