Engineering teams that prioritize continuous feedback

Feedback is a gift.

At Indent, our focus is on human-centric problem solving. Whether it’s an engineer who needs access to a cloud storage bucket for 30 minutes – or the admin on the other end who needs to make sure the right people have access for the correct amount of time – our goal is to package different data privacy solutions to meet our clients’ specific needs. We want to be able to scale to the largest Fortune 500 companies and eventually also meet the needs of smaller companies like your local dental office. That’s why regular and open feedback about our product and business is so crucial to our growth. We view all forms of feedback from teammates, customers and the market, as a gift that both leads and motivates us to improve.

We’re looking for team-members who focus on the evolution of an idea to the final product, and can easily share their thoughts in real-time. In return, we promise to give consistent, candid feedback as well.

Trade-offs: We’d rather get raw feedback at the earliest stage of a project than wait to present an entirely polished end result. When receiving difficult feedback, we try to look for the productive takeaways and lessons learned for next time.

We’re obsessed with the process and love learning from our customers and our team members.

Our design and development process is centered around two-week sprints where we deploy rapidly, learn from our users, and continually iterate. Time is everything to us – and we like to work efficiently and optimally. That means team members need to feel comfortable stating their opinions and openly debating any decision we make that they might disagree with. Everyone has a voice in this company. (It’s just a matter of surfacing what you believe to be true in a constructive and positive manner!)

We gather feedback from our partners, end users, and analytics tools, and we’re focused on having researched business cases behind every decision we make. We want to hire people who have expertise in areas where our current team members do not. As our engineering team has grown, we’ve organically started to pair more. We’re not dogmatic about pairing in any way, and wouldn’t even say that we’ve cultivated a pairing culture, but our engineers naturally come together to review each other’s pull requests and work through problems together. As we continue to grow, we hope to move further and further away from silos.

We praise those who give feedback early and often.

Feedback is essential for effective communication and psychological safety. However, we recognize giving effective feedback can be difficult to do – it can be uncomfortable and there's always a risk of triggering defensiveness if not done thoughtfully. As a result, feedback loops close and collaboration suffers on most teams as they grow. We care deeply about giving and receiving feedback in a way that makes others feel cared about and not targeted.

Whether it’s informally in meetings, via manager 1:1s or during all-hands, we put a lot of energy into developing good practices for giving feedback. For example, we have quarterly reviews since this allows us to check in with each other more frequently, and address what’s working well (so we can continue) and what needs to be improved. We also hold workshops on giving and receiving feedback and apply those skills in our everyday interactions. You can learn more about how we connect through feedback here.

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.

Inherent in our collaborative nature is both giving and receiving feedback continuously.

You’ll never be in the dark about how you’re doing. All engineers have weekly 1:1 meetings with their manager, and everyone has the opportunity to give regular feedback to managers and senior staff.

Even as we've grown (and more recently made the shift to being fully remote), we’ve all taken time to pause and help each other out with constructive criticism and guidance. We pride ourselves on having an engineering team that is both focused and fully engaged, and we emphasize giving and accepting feedback with grace and maturity. That combination empowers the rest of the team to go forth and do their best work.

Render is a place where you can grow your career.

Commitment and ownership are core qualities you'll find in each of us, which is part of why Render is a place where people want to stay and grow their careers. We strive to create a supportive work environment based on mutual respect and continuous learning through regular 1:1s, team meetings, and Slack discussions driven by empathy and candor. We also offer an equitable compensation model. This includes regular compensation parity reviews, employee-friendly stock option exercise windows, and generous benefits for you, your future, and your loved ones. Finally, we’re in this for the long run, which means placing a premium on managing work/life balance. We take care of ourselves and actively make sure we keep the pace sustainable to avoid burnout. We raised a $50M Series B in 2023 and are continuing to grow the team. If you're excited about joining a startup where you can expand your skill set, we’d love to hear from you!