Engineering at Qualia

Engineers have the right resources and tooling to ship code every day.

Founded by engineers, Qualia’s priority has always been to develop truly great products. We’ve fostered a culture of high autonomy and alignment, enabling our engineering team to lead innovation and build products from the ground up.

To ensure our engineers have what they need to move fast and ship high-quality code, we also have powerful internal libraries and tooling to help our team explore options and solve problems quickly. For example, one of the many tools used by our team, Reval, (which lets you see front-end changes in real time as you make changes to code), was built by one of our co-founders, Lucas Hansen.

While the team has evolved over time, maintaining our core values has remained our top priority even as Qualia has continued raising funds (our Series D in late 2020), growing well beyond a $1B valuation. Our engineering team still sits center-stage, and we provide the tools and support needed in order for them to drive product development and guide the roadmap.

Our engineers don’t just write code – they’re key players in our strategy.

Qualia engineers are involved throughout the entire product life cycle, from conception to architecture and implementation. Developers at Qualia are empowered as builders and creative thinkers and play key roles in the development of our products. Engineers have the opportunity to explore new potential product or feature solutions for customer pain points, and we’ve had a few releases start as hackathon projects based on customer requests. Our engineers have developed a flexible infrastructure for real estate that not only brings the industry together as a digitally-connected ecosystem, but also enables businesses of all shapes and sizes – from household brand names such as Realtor.com and Redfin to newly-funded proptech companies – to modernize and provide better, more efficient service.

Our engineers feel ownership over the products they’re working on, and have the agency to make key product decisions alongside our product team.

Two heads are always better than one.

People who thrive at Qualia are inquisitive, customer-focused, and – most important – collaborative. Company-wide, we seek out opportunities to share knowledge and combine efforts. Our engineers work closely with team members in all parts of the organization (particularly with Product and Design), ensuring stronger cohesion across teams and a greater overall understanding of our customers’ needs. We believe the best ideas can come from anyone, and everyone at Qualia is encouraged to ask questions, join discussions, and speak their mind.

We’re all working toward the same goal – to transform home buying and selling into a quick, simple, and secure experience. Being a cross-functional, team-focused organization is critical to our success.

We’ve built a team that helps one another thrive.

At Qualia, we’re committed to ensuring engineers feel both challenged and supported. Not only are our engineers talented programmers with unique backgrounds, but they are also incredibly accomplished and humble people with a wide variety of interests. The team is made up of former founders (Razvan Popa), engineering leaders (Alla Rozenfeld), and developers from all types of backgrounds and industries. As an example, in addition to our three technical co-founders, Jack Lukic, the creator of Semantic UI, is our VP of Design.

We aim to foster an environment that encourages curiosity, learning, and mentorship. In addition to interactive onboarding tutorials (featuring a gravity simulation and security challenges) to help new hires get up to speed, we also have engineers give educational talks every Thursday on any topic of their choosing. We’ve learned about everything from Kolmogorov complexity theory to models of existential risk, and, more recently, the art (and mathematics) of origami!

Qualia is a place to build careers.

We’re a close-knit team, and many of our engineers have been at Qualia from the beginning. Since our founding in 2015, most engineers have remained on the team, and of those few that left, several decided to return.

As we continue to grow, our aim is to ensure that everyone at Qualia feels, above all, excited to be a part of the team. We’ve made a commitment to maintain our vibrant culture while continuing to improve our employee experience as the company scales. In addition to offering comprehensive health benefits (learn more about our benefits below under Work/Life Balance!), we’ve developed a robust onboarding program for new hires, professional development opportunities, and we’re actively involved in community-focused volunteering. When the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order transitioned Qualia to work-from-home, we placed an even greater emphasis on keeping employees engaged through biweekly all-hands meetings, virtual events, and team bondings (online cooking classes and trivia are recent examples!).

You’re more than your job title.

We hire based on potential and expertise, so we know we have a strong team and we’re not overly concerned with titles or hierarchy. Our goal is to keep our organization relatively flat – with minimal layers – in order to ensure greater ownership for each team member and a decreased amount of administrative work. We want our engineers to focus on being engineers.

We also pride ourselves on having an extremely accessible team – our CEO, Nate Baker, is always willing to answer questions or talk strategy, and our CTO, Lucas, has weekly open office hours. Everyone at Qualia is encouraged to bring their own unique voice and perspective to the table, and we expect people to be open and understanding in return.

We work hard, but make sure no one is in danger of burning out.

While we have ambitious goals at Qualia – and plenty to do before we reach them – it’s important to us that everyone leads full lives outside of the office. While the team works San Francisco hours, we trust our engineers to manage their own time and work.

We also provide a benefits package designed with the health and happiness of our employees in mind. Our flexible time off policy allows people to take time away from the office to recharge, both physically and mentally. Qualia also offers a 401k program to help with financial planning and generous parental leave for teammates with growing families. While we’re remote during COVID-19, we also provide daily meditation sessions, online fitness challenges, and a variety of internal virtual clubs such as our diversity, equity, and inclusion book club.

Empathy is key to Qualia’s culture.

First and foremost, we believe in hiring people who are kind, decent, and respectful. We’re looking for the best engineers to join our team, and we believe the best engineers have high emotional intelligence.

In such a collaborative environment, it’s imperative that Qualia engineers know how to communicate effectively, as well as give and receive constructive feedback. Healthy team dynamics are critical to our success, so how you approach working with others is just as – if not more – important than how you approach a technical problem. Our most successful coworkers are those who share their knowledge and focus on helping the greater team work better together.

At the end of the day, we’re all working towards the same goal – to make it easier for anyone to own a home. It’s often the largest purchase a person will make in their life, and we’ve assembled a team that’s passionate about easing that process. While not everyone at Qualia has necessarily purchased a house of their own, we expect our team members to be able to put themselves in the shoes of our users – whether it’s the consumer buying their first house or the title agent pulling together all the pieces of the closing. We believe technology is the key to restoring healthy homeownership to the United States, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of that change within the real estate industry.