Engineering at Qualified

We dogfood our own platform daily and always look to make our customers’ lives better.

Sales and marketing teams look to Qualified to modernize and optimize their approach to a process that is most critical to their companies’ success – generating new business. With our conversational marketing tool, companies can identify and instantly engage with valuable buyers directly on their site. Our customers place a great deal of trust in our product and we aim to be trusted partners to them, as invested in their success as they are.

We have a world-class customer success team that regularly connects with customers and provides a steady stream of high-fidelity feedback and insight. Engineers sync with them once a week to learn about what’s working and any customer pain points we can improve. Our on-call rotation also allows engineers to stay connected to our customers and live and breathe how the product operates. What’s more, we are the most passionate and committed users of our own technology – we use our platform to grow Qualified. Our engineering efforts are always closely tied to the value we’re creating for customers and are never done in a vacuum.

People do their best work when they feel empowered by ownership and the opportunity to make an impact.

Our engineers aren’t just expected to write great code – we challenge them to be product-minded and involved in every aspect of bringing products to market from end-to-end. For example, after speaking with several customers, one of our engineers drove our reporting API feature from start to finish in order to give customers better visibility into their data.

It’s important that engineers approach their work holistically, aspiring to fully understand both the customer and the problem space. To that end, engineers have control over the processes and tools they use to do their job. For example, our data analytics team did a deep dive into multiple data warehouses to determine the best tool that we adopted as a product team. Engineers that thrive at Qualified continuously search for optimal outcomes – challenging assumptions, asking hard questions, and leveraging their creativity – rather than just delivering according to specs.

Our success relies on transparency.

We believe it takes the full engagement of every team member to build a truly successful and impactful business, which is why transparency is so crucial. The entire company meets regularly to align on the goals of the business and each department as well as to celebrate our successes. At our bi-weekly all-hands we openly hear from leadership as well as a specific department (which rotates) so everyone is in the loop on how we’re doing and what’s in the pipeline. New hires are also introduced at these meetings so we can get to know you (think sharing a few photos and a fun fact or two).

Similarly, the product and engineering team maintains an open and collaborative approach to product design and development, soliciting input from across the team to ensure alignment and well-informed execution. While we’re happy to hop on a 1:1 call as needed, we also emphasize open transparency via Slack channels so everyone can stay in the loop. Given our fast-paced environment, we recognize that mistakes will happen along the way, but we always look for the learning opportunity. That’s why we practice blameless post-mortems and never single out individuals if things don’t go exactly as planned.

You’ll be called to tackle projects that have a direct and outsized impact on the success of the business and our customers. Our commitment is to equip you with the knowledge and the environment you need to feel closely connected to the goals of the business in your daily work. We want you to feel like you are not just writing code but rather contributing directly to the ongoing success of Qualified as a whole.

As a small-but-nimble team, we encourage folks to fill in gaps and expand their skill sets.

We are a small engineering team within a rapidly-growing company in a new and quickly-evolving market. We continue to operate like a startup, staying nimble so we can innovate and outmaneuver competitors. Since we encourage people to work with folks from other departments, engineers might end up on a customer call, talking about a new feature or hearing from a customer directly. It’s also common for our tech leads to wear product manager hats.

While there are certainly opportunities for those who prefer to specialize, there are many fresh and interesting product initiatives for engineers who love diving into new challenges, working cross-functionally, and expanding their horizons. For example, when we decided to build a mobile app, Cody stepped up and took the lead despite having no prior experience in mobile development. He worked directly with Thani, our VP of Product Design, as well as other stakeholders to gather requirements and ensure that the app adds real value for our customers.

Leveraging resources across the company helps us do our best work.

Our own sales and marketing teams are the most avid users of our products. Our customer success team works closely with our customers and are the advocates and champions for their success. These stakeholders across the company are passionate and knowledgeable about the product and their involvement is invaluable when we build new products and features.

Engineers regularly work across departments as part of scoping projects and to solicit input and insights. We often dogfood new features and products, deploying early iterations internally to collect feedback, validate assumptions, and solidify long-term direction.

We dogfood our own product and look to our customers to inform our roadmap.

While we’re still a small engineering team, we pride ourselves on our ability to bring products to market quickly and we do so by adopting an “MVP” mindset. In other words, we make smart initial investments – releasing a basic feature set quickly – and then we rely on the insights and feedback of our users before we determine a long-term direction.

We have a tight feedback loop with our customers through our customer success team and we regularly dogfood our products to get early feedback from internal users. We encourage all of our product team to take this results-oriented approach and we look for product-minded engineers who are skillful at incorporating real-world feedback into their work. This is how we stay nimble, continue to innovate, and outmaneuver our competitors.

While the company has grown in size, our engineering team has stayed relatively lean and flat, so we plan our teams and projects around where we can have the highest impact.

The importance of digital engagement for B2B companies has grown significantly in recent years and accelerated with the recent dramatic shift to remote work. These tailwinds, our market-leading product, and the strengths of our team all put us in a strong position to take the lead in an expanding multi-billion dollar market. While many companies slowed their hiring in 2022, we continued to grow to meet market demands, expanding our team from ~70 to ~180 employees.

On the engineering side, projects can range from one to three to six months, and we assign teams based on project needs and expertise. This means new engineers on the team can expect to work with different folks and gain exposure to a wide range of interesting, unique problems. We’re not afraid to pivot as needed to build products that best serve our customers’ needs. For example, we launched Signals, which uses an AI predictive model to give sales reps better insights into which accounts are sales-ready or just starting their research. Aggregating data and presenting customers with dynamic graphs showing account trends and clear activity timelines enables them to better maximize their sales pipelines.

There are ample opportunities for engineers of all stripes to take on exciting challenges like expanding the Pipeline Cloud – a revolutionary new set of technologies and processes designed to help modern revenue teams drive pipeline, faster. If this excites you in any way, we encourage you to reach out!

A majority of our growth has happened in a distributed environment.

We’ve grown from 20 to 185 employees and from seed stage to Series C during the distributed workforce era and have genuinely embraced a remote-first culture. Although we maintain a headquarters in San Francisco, the majority of our employees are remote across the U.S. and Canada. We have folks in California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and North Carolina, to name a few places and we’re committed to creating a great work environment for all employees – regardless of their preferred work arrangement.

What does this mean? All of our team communication and meetings happen via remote-friendly channels like Slack and Zoom. Teams are free to meet periodically on-site in San Francisco for working sessions, project kickoffs, or just to have the chance to connect. We also host regular remote-inclusive activities such as regular virtual happy hours, bi-weekly tech-talks and product demos as well as in-person team or company-wide offsites in fun locations like Sonoma or Las Vegas. This flexibility is great for folks who are growing their families, too. In fact, Maura, our Chief Marketing Officer, shares her experience on finding balance in her career and as a parent here. To support new parents, we offer several benefits such as the first week of meals on us (7 days of free meals; $100 max per day) and a night nanny service (team members may be reimbursed for a one-week night nanny; $1,000 max per day).

And last, but certainly not least, we compensate all of our employees the same regardless of their location – equal pay for equal work!