Companies that choose to promote from with the company

Championing our own talent is key, especially as we scale.

While many companies claim they want to foster growth internally, we have done so from day one. Six out of seven of our people managers were promoted from within. For example, Jack, our CTO, started as a tech lead. With one exception all our people managers were hired as individual contributors and later promoted into management. As we continue to scale, it’s important that our employees grow with us, too. That said, we recognize there are multiple paths to grow your career and not everyone wants to move into people management. If you prefer to level up as an IC, we fully support that option as well.

When you grow, we grow.

You are a plank-holder in this company and we are invested in growing our own. Our ideal candidates are passionate about self-awareness and personal growth. Evan started as a Senior Engineer and was promoted to Lead Engineer within a year, thanks to his drive to tackle challenging problems and lead technical initiatives on the team. In Evan’s third month he launched Jane’s product review feature, and has continued to impact the product and cannabis industry!

We want to work with great people who are excited about self-improvement both in their personal and professional lives. If we know someone has a certain interest or passion, we’ll do our best to make sure to involve them on a relevant feature or project. For instance, Athena started as a Partner Success Manager. She took the initiative to help build out technical documentation for the team. She kept an open dialogue with her manager about her interest in the technical side of things, and when a QA Analyst role was created, Athena interviewed and moved to the product team.

Julia is another great example. Having previously worked in the cannabis retail space for several years, she understands firsthand the pain points users face on the floor. Being able to empathize with customers using point of sale systems day in and day out enables her to go above and beyond for partners and advocate for features that would best serve them. She now manages POS and payments on the partner success team. As she puts it, “One of the things I love most about Jane is how leadership is not only great at recognizing team members’ diverse experiences, but also finding ways to apply that experience and make folks feel appreciated.” Ultimately, we are 100% bought-in and will always invest in the people who are bought-in, too.

We want you to grow your career here!

As a small but growing team, we still have a flat structure that embraces collaboration, mentorship, and learning. We’re also committed to promoting internal talent who’re interested in moving into people management. Alex is a great example: he progressed into becoming an engineering manager, thanks to his proactive support of the team and emphasis on mentorship.

That said, we recognize that people management isn’t the only way to grow your career. We also support engineers moving into tech lead roles or leveling up as ICs to the equivalent of a principal engineer.

We aspire to have a good balance between promoting from within and hiring externally.

As we scale, there’s a lot of opportunity to take on new projects, grow your skill set, and level-up in your career. As Matt, one of our engineering managers (who was promoted from within), puts it, “I was first tasked with becoming our expert in Real Time Payments. That grew into a general expertise for all bank integrations. Now I'm managing the team responsible for payments.”

Several other team members have been promoted internally as well. For example, Andy Qin was promoted to engineering manager; Julien and Sean were promoted to senior software engineer. We also like to foster talent from our internship program (see Committed to Personal Growth above) and have extended full-time offers to interns like Aaron and Nisha. Regardless of if you’re just starting out in your career or are further along, we want to help you gain the skills and expertise to get where you want to go.

We’ve promoted many people to leadership roles in the last two years.

As a quickly growing company, we’ve been fortunate to have both the need and the opportunity to promote from within. In fact, several team members were promoted to leadership positions: Steve (Director of Engineering), Justin (Engineering Manager), Faye (Design Lead), Andrew (VP of Sales), Xerxes (Managing Director of Sales), and Sarah (Head of Production Operations). We’ve seen how well it’s worked to develop our own talents’ growth and it’s just the beginning.

In exciting news, we recently raised a $60M Series C! Since the launch of our research platform in 2020, we’ve powered the creation of patient-centered real-world data cohorts in hematology, neurology, and rare diseases to help advance treatments and cures. This additional funding will help us build 30 new patient-centered real-world data cohorts, as well as continue to invest in improving the process of getting patients timely access to up-to-date medical records. If you’re passionate about joining a mission-driven team, don’t hesitate to check out our open roles!

We care about the career trajectory of everyone on the team.

We believe people are the most precious and valuable asset to any company, so it’s no surprise we’re deeply invested in the career growth of all Karateers. In fact, our name underscores this. A “caret” is a symbol (^) used to express exponents. In our case, the caret symbol represents the potential exponential growth of the people we hire and reminds us to walk the walk as a human-centered company. We want to create opportunities for people to grow, and when they do, create roles that can match that growth. During every review cycle we have an active dialogue about who on our team has demonstrated the skills necessary to move to the next level, and what special projects or initiatives we can give to folks to help them achieve their potential. There’s also a strong internal pipeline since many of our staff engineers, like Jason, started as contract interview engineers. Several senior engineers have been promoted from within and we have a path for ICs to develop who don’t want to manage people, while others started as software engineers and have transitioned to management.

We want you to progress in your career here.

While there are a lot of benefits that come from hiring managers externally (who can share best practices and processes), we also care deeply about helping our talent grow both personally and professionally. Mary is a great example. She was one of our first three engineers and now manages our Product Eng team (frontend, fullstack, mobile eng) and has done an incredible job building out a highly empathetic and ambitious team. On the design side of the house, we promoted our first designer, Bing, to lead all things Product and Brand design. That said, there are multiple ways to grow your career and if folks want to level-up as ICs, we support that too! (We’re in the process of rolling out engineering levels to help with outlining and codifying growth paths.) Currently, formal 360 reviews happen every six months. During this time we go through a calibration process with managers, leadership, and the HR team where we discuss every person’s performance review (to help mitigate any bias) as well as their compensation with respect to their performance, market rate, and internal equity.