Engineering at Repeat

“Team is our Unfair Advantage” is one of our core company values.

At Repeat, we’re building software that makes it effortless for consumers to reorder the products they love. To do so successfully requires a culture that emphasizes cumulative, shared ownership. A critical part of our interview process is discovering collaboration style – we intentionally hire folks that share their ideas in an empathetic and collaborative manner.

Every member of the team takes pride in empowering others, which allows us to celebrate everything we ship together, as a team. While some of us may have more experience in certain parts of the stack, we’re always willing to jump in, learn new skills, and help out where we can. For instance, while Diego has a ton of backend experience, he has recently discovered a love for React, and is now a full-stack engineer! Similarly, pairing is a big part of our culture (you’ll likely work with every engineer on the team at some point) and it happens organically. Not only do we learn more by touching each other’s code, but it also enables us to strengthen relationships and hand off in-flight work across time zones. Inter-team mentorship is important to us and all engineers will have the chance to lead a project. Ultimately, our cross-functional approach increases the quality and reliability of our work.

It’s important that team members feel safe to speak up, whether it’s about something technical or personal.

While creating a safe environment to fail (see below) is important for encouraging technical risk-taking, we believe psychological safety is equally important for interpersonal risk-taking. If you’re having a bad day, really love a tool we aren’t using at Repeat yet, or are feeling anxious about a big architectural decision, we want you to be able to share those feelings without fear of rejection or retribution in any form. Since we work in a highly collaborative environment, it’s essential that everyone feels empowered to speak up, share their ideas, and ask for support when needed. Doing so in a safe and respectful environment is not only critical for reaching the optimal decision, but also for building the best product possible.

While we’re remote-first, we also embrace flexibility with an in-office option.

Our team members span different time zones and we fully embrace remote work. We try to ensure four hours of overlap every day (from 9am to 1pm PST), but otherwise, we rely on each team member to determine how, when, and where they work toward our shared goals. That said, we also have a HQ office in Marina Del Rey. If you’re visiting for a team event or live in the LA area, you can feel free to work from the office whenever it’s conducive. Prefer to work from a coworking space? We offer a stipend for that, too.

There are several passionate travelers on the team, and in the past few months, we’ve shipped features from several new countries, many coworking spaces, and even a boat!

We work hard, but make sure to take time to recharge, too.

It is inevitable that your work life influences your life outside of work (and vice-versa), and we strive to ensure that those influences are positive. Everyone at Repeat is empowered to take ownership of their health. Whether it’s getting outside for a lunchtime walk, taking a mental health day, or going on vacation, we support and encourage one another to take breaks.

We won’t tell you, “You’ve been working hard, take a day off,” because that robs you of your agency to make the choice for yourself and sets a precedent of asking for permission. We will, however, thank you for taking care of our team and yourself when you tell us about your upcoming vacation.

From spending time with friends and family to playing pickleball (Cory is a big fan) or traveling around the globe, we all have full lives outside of the office and make sure to take time to enjoy them!

Failing is a great way to learn, and high-profile bugs often teach more than they cost.

We ship to production often, sometimes multiple times a day. Quickly iterating helps us learn and if nothing ever breaks, we’re under-indexing on speed. However, we always view missteps as learning opportunities and never place the blame on any one person. For instance, when we experienced a production outage or a recent time zone bug, it only motivated analysis and improvement of our systems.

Different features require different levels of certainty around success – both technically and from a product perspective. Ascertaining these levels and executing appropriately is critical to the success of the business, and if we avoid all failure on a micro level, we believe we’ll fail on a macro level. At the end of the day, while perfect code doesn’t exist, we each take complete responsibility in producing excellence. We review code thoroughly, write tests and design architecture collaboratively, and practice blameless postmortems so we can learn from failures and celebrate wins together.

One of our core values is “we build in public” and we mean that.

Unlike at many other startups, we place a large emphasis on transparency. Avoiding silos is key and we’re very active in Slack. Having a written culture allows people to easily jump in where needed or catch up (we don’t expect you to be green on Slack 24/7). Whether it’s at our all-hands meeting on Monday, company-wide check-in on Wednesday, or daily standups, information flows freely. In fact, our CEO, Kim, leads the first two meetings and openly shares important information. Similarly, Benton, our VP of engineering, encourages engineers to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts (the good, the bad, and everything in between) during 1:1s or as an issue arises. We also emphasize candid feedback during our weekly retrospectives and make sure everyone has the opportunity to share their thoughts.

Last but not least, we believe in checking egos at the door and working from a place of high compassion. In other words, a developer is not their code – we strive to give the type of feedback we’d hope to receive. Being thoughtful communicators allows us to lean on each other and empower one another to speak up and be heard. This is something we actively screen for during interviews – we want to see how you articulate your ideas (which is always more important to us than whether you arrived at the right answer).

We’re transforming the way consumers interact with CPG brands.

Our co-founders, Kim and Sarah, discovered firsthand when building a clothing company that the process of subscribing to consumer products is not a great experience. People either end up with way too much (of consumer goods like toilet paper, toothpaste, etc.) or too little. Thus, Repeat was born, with the goal of improving the consumer reordering experience and driving brand loyalty for consumer packaged goods customers.

We always strive to put the consumer first, making reordering seamless with features like pre-populated shopping carts, SMS and email notifications when they’re running low on a product, and a 15-60 second checkout process. This eliminates the need for subscription trappings that aren’t on their timeline and removes the hassle of creating accounts and remembering logins. Similarly, we’re able to focus on both sides of the market by leveraging consumer data to help CPG brands retain customers. We’re even taking things a step further with CPG House, a by-application space for CPG founders and operators. Members benefit from exclusive event recaps, recordings, and content from our team and can talk, share, and strategize with others in the community.

Engineers work closely with the product team and feedback loops are tight – starting early on with technical investigations that inform product strategy. We collaborate throughout the entire product development lifecycle to maintain alignment and incorporate the customer’s best interest in every feature. For instance, David took the lead on our Postscript integration, working hand-in-hand with the rest of the team. We believe engineering work at Repeat should be informed by the value delivered and prioritize accordingly. When a big deal closes because of a new integration, sales and engineering celebrate together.

Every single employee at Repeat is a piece of the puzzle to success.

When we selected the values for our profile, Impressive Team Members had unanimous support. If you ask any of us why we love working here, you’ll likely get the same answer: the people (you can meet the team here). As Benton puts it, “What impresses me most about the team is how humble and collaborative everyone is. Working on new integrations to close major deals can be stressful or exciting, and we always make it exciting!”

We believe in hiring the right people for the right job at the right time and aren’t looking for a certain university or brand name on your resume. Folks on the team hail from big companies like Stripe and Meta as well as smaller startups and we have a mix of backgrounds on the team. In addition to traditional CS degrees, academic backgrounds include mathematics and psychology.

As we grow, we’re looking for people who are excited to tackle interesting problems such as enhancing product recommendation logic, shipping a public Shopify app, and using data science to identify consumer behavior insights. If you’re equally thrilled about transforming how brands engage repeat customers, don’t hesitate to get in touch!