Engineering Team at Upduo

We’re leveraging the latest technology to deliver the most effective learning and coaching platform possible.

At Upduo, we help companies deliver engaging one-on-one coaching sessions at scale that drive measurable business outcomes. While other learning and training platforms tend to use older legacy frameworks, we take advantage of the latest technologies to create a tool that is fun for end users and effective for companies. We use Django on the backend and React, React Native, and TypeScript for our frontend.

By staying on the cutting edge of these frameworks’ releases, we’re able to remain nimble and beat out legacy incumbents. In the near future, we’ll also have additional microservices that use even newer frameworks. That said, if you haven’t worked with a certain tech stack before, it’s not a problem at all. In fact, all of our current engineers used completely different tech stacks before joining us! We look for folks who are eager to learn.

The pandemic only underscored the increasing need for better virtual learning options and there’s clear product-market fit. As we continue to migrate our infrastructure to new technologies and delve into AI (to help recommend curriculums to customers for example), new hires will have lots of exciting problems to work on.

We’re on a mission to help everyone reach their full potential, one conversation at a time.

As a company dedicated to learning, it should come as no surprise that we practice what we preach. There’s a $1,000 annual learning stipend which team members have used for foreign language classes, software development courses, books on many subjects (i.e. graphic design, finance, AI/ML), and even craft supplies. We also regularly dogfood our own product, so you’ll always find someone willing to teach you something new. Whether it’s educational code reviews, pair and mob programming, working with an intern (we’ve had several repeat interns!), or an engineer learning about sales and marketing – the mentorship limits are endless. You’re not tied to what’s written in your job description, and we always support each other’s goals to grow both personally and professionally. Interested in moving into management? We’ll give you the opportunity to be a lead on a project. Prefer to level up as an IC? We support that, too!

We’re working toward the same goal as a team.

We treat each other with respect, work collaboratively, and listen to each other to find the best path forward. ​​Team members should always feel comfortable sharing their ideas and opinions. Starting on day one with new employee onboarding, we solicit as much feedback as possible about our processes, platform, and our team. In every 1:1 with managers, direct reports are encouraged to voice their ideas first. We also provide built-in opportunities for people on different teams to collaborate. For instance, there are two weekly meetings for this very purpose, where a customer success team member might surface a frequently-requested feature to the product team or an engineer might suggest a tool that will streamline a process for the sales team.

Mistakes are inevitable, but we always focus on the issue at hand and never point fingers. Previously, we had a book club and read Beyond Blame, which walks through how a company handled a postmortem for a major infrastructure issue. We model our postmortems in the same vein and acknowledge that issues can happen to any of us. The emphasis should always be on improvements we can make in the future. A great example of this happened recently: we had the biggest spike in our server traffic that we’d ever had, which brought our infrastructure down. Ben, our co-founder and CEO, openly shared that it was related to a decision he made back when he made the first version of the server. The entire team came together to focus on the problem: while customer support communicated with customers, engineers resolved significant bottlenecks to our server traffic and shored up the necessary parts of the codebase.

We deliver personalized learning experiences to help communities of any size.

As a high school math teacher, Mike (co-founder and Chief Education Officer) saw firsthand how important peer-to-peer learning is in the classroom. This led him to brainstorm what 1:1 coaching could look like in the workplace for both smaller startups and Fortune 500 companies. He teamed up with Ben (co-founder and CEO) and Wei (co-founder and CTO/COO) to found Upduo, with the mission of transforming the educational landscape through live peer-to-peer coaching at scale. Today, over 15,000 conversations happen every week on Upduo and our live 1:1 interactions help with everything from scaling companies’ sales trainings to streamlining onboarding processes and improving diversity and inclusion.

It’s fair to say we’re comfortable with ambiguity and open to change when it makes sense. In fact, we changed our core user flow three times in response to new learnings, without falling for the sunk cost fallacy. We also migrated our entire frontend to React with Hooks and TypeScript in just one month. We constantly ask ourselves, “Are we coming up with the best solution we can, or are we simply taking cues from ‘best practices’?” If the answer happens to be the latter, then we give it extra attention. In practice, this means we give engineers high-level problem statements but empower them with the freedom to explore and implement their own solutions. Of course, you’ll always have the full support of everyone on the team if you bump into any roadblocks or just need a sounding board.

Having a high-quality codebase means faster deployments and a more enjoyable engineer experience.

As soon as you join the team, you’ll be able to push your first commits by Friday. This holds true for everyone – whether you’re an intern on the team for a month or a more senior engineer. We pride ourselves on having a high-quality codebase, which means we can deploy often. All team members are free to create pull requests and push code into our development branch in our staging branch. There are two sets of eyes for all code and all code reviews follow the same blameless mentality. For us, it’s always about learning and making something better, which is why comments remain focused on the technical problem at hand. We all bring something different to the table. For example, one of our interns didn’t know our backend framework, but she shared a couple of really great shortcuts that our team didn’t have before.

We also have high unit test coverage over the critical pieces of our infrastructure and are well on our way to a complete CI/CD pipeline that allows rapid, high-quality deployments. Ultimately, we believe that shipping often not only boosts overall morale, but it also makes us happier engineers since we can see the immediate impact our code has on our customers’ lives.

We are fully remote and trust you to get your work done.

As a distributed team, we span several time zones and don’t expect you to be green on Slack 24/7. We are mindful about our varied working hours and will gladly move a meeting or record it if someone can’t attend. In general, our meeting cadence is fairly light. We have a weekly team alignment meeting on Monday and then a wider alignment meeting (around 15 minutes) where one person from each team joins to give updates on what everyone is working on. These are documented in written form so you can always catch up on your own time if you can’t make the meeting. There’s also a monthly all-hands meeting where our founders share their thoughts and answer any questions. Outside of our limited weekly meetings and on-call schedule, we trust engineers to manage their own schedules and fulfill their work responsibilities.

In addition, we offer a $500 work-from-home stipend, which can be used for a coworking space or office setup. While we’re great at working asynchronously, we also value getting the team together in-person. We aim to have an offsite at least once per quarter and sub-teams like engineering or product also have their own offsites to get together to work and play.

You shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality of life for good pay.

Too many people in tech approach their careers as a simple compensation maximization problem. They end up in companies that are happy to pay them 10-100% more, but then demand they work 20-200% harder. All of this to say, at Upduo we believe in fair compensation and a healthy work/life balance. As Dani, our Director of Marketing says, “One of the things that drew me to Upduo was that two of our three founders are parents. When it comes to work/life balance, they lead by example.” Folks on the team (as well as our vendors) are great about respecting each other’s working hours and we strive to make sure evenings and weekends are free. Whatever your passions are outside of the office, we want you to take the time to fully enjoy them.

We’ve worked hard to build a culture where everyone feels they belong.

As we grow, we’re committed to building a workplace where every single employee feels safe, welcome, and empowered to do their best work. Our diverse experiences and viewpoints allow us to build the best product possible. If you don’t have a traditional CS degree or come from a different technical background, that’s not a barrier at all. One of our team members, Vicky, started her career as an accountant before pivoting to engineering at Upduo. She’s now our Head of Product. We also have a couple engineers who switched from mechanical and aerospace engineering to software engineering.

Our product allows for conversations that create a safe space for employees to ask questions, practice skills, and learn, and we take that to heart internally as well. We use our own platform to get different team members to teach each other about their areas of the company (i.e. our Head of Marketing might explain an upcoming partnership announcement to one of our engineers, or a UI/UX designer might discuss a new feature with our Chief Revenue Officer).

We’re a highly empathetic and collaborative team where you’re more than just your title or role. Whether you’re an intern or a senior engineer, if you’re leading a project, you’ll have the full support of everyone on the team. That means even Wei (co-founder and CTO/COO) might be your direct report for that project. If you’re passionate about learning, you’ll feel right at home. Come grow with us!