As cities across the country continue on their path toward reopening, companies are moving forward at full speed on legacy projects, new initiatives and team expansion. In the strongest single-month gain since August 2020, the U.S. added 850,000 jobs in June, alongside a three-month streak of wage increases, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This data points to a hiring market that favors applicants — as organizations expand and the economy recovers from more than a year of contraction, job opportunities are abundant and the demand for talent is high. With so many openings to choose from, prospective new hires have leverage to expect competitive benefits and positive team culture, as well as greater freedom to choose companies and products that speak to their specific interests and professional goals.
If you’re an engineer looking to grow your career, expand your tech skill set and get to know a new team, these five Colorado companies want to meet you.
What they do: Delivered as a cloud service with cross-platform support, Automox consolidates IT operations into a single console to help IT teams scale, streamline workflows, and minimize risk and exposure.
I love that Automox empowers its employees to take ownership in their domains of interest.’’
Their tech stack: “Our stack is a pretty standard SaaS stack, with plenty of AWS, Jenkins and Github. We use Okta for SSO/2fa, which I love, and GSuite for mail. We’re very startup friendly, so we’re using HR tools such as Rippling. Other companies I’ve worked for have had very heavyweight, unpleasant or ancient tooling around HR and reimbursements. All of our tools feel very light, new and nice to use.”
Scaled support: “I just joined our new QEops team to focus on scale testing. We have a scale testing framework written in Go that we use to test potential production changes on our staging environment. It needs to be enhanced, and we need to become more predictive and aggressive around performance expectations.”
I love that Automox empowers its employees to move around and take ownership in their domains of interest. It never feels like leadership is onerous or micromanaging. There are reasonable expectations, help is always available, and you get the sense that everyone is really working towards one goal together, which I think can be quite rare in tech.”
Pacing for success: “For most of my career I tested software that ran on specialized hardware. Releases were large, coordinated efforts, and you had different versions of hardware and software out in the field that needed to be supported for a long time.”
“Automox was my first startup and my first SaaS company. We release daily; more frequently if possible. That means there is a very limited amount of time to integration test against the set of all changes going out, but it’s much easier to fix bugs or pull back parts of the release. We can easily monitor all aspects of the system. I’ve been enjoying the change of pace in testing smaller changes and shipping more often, and I love not having to determine if faulty hardware is part of the problem, or debug old releases of software. Working for a startup is great because our culture is still quite playful and optimistic. Politics don’t seem to be an issue, nor do overtime slogs to an arbitrary release date. The product has so much potential, and I think we’re all pretty energized by it.”
What they do: Supporting companies like Zoom, Walmart and Square, BetterCloud provides an expanding ecosystem of SAAS integrations to automate processes and policies across cloud applications.
Their tech stack: “We primarily code in Java, but we have some services written in Scala as well. We use things like Kubernetes, Kafka, Harness and Postman. APIs are the core of our business — from our own external API, to the ones we use internally, to the all-important third-party APIs for the SaaS apps that we integrate with. We’re standardizing on OpenAPI for our REST APIs and we also have a GraphQL layer for our reporting data.”
Our engineers are enthusiastic and engaged, with open minds and a deep desire to grow.’’
Tandem scaling: “We process an enormous amount of data in our system across multiple SaaS providers, and we hit every scaling limit you can imagine — from data storage and transport, to API rate limits, to managing real-time updates. As our customer base grows and as our customers expand their own businesses, we have to continually monitor and evolve our system performance and throughput. Scaling as our customers scale (or better yet, ahead of them) is the most challenging problem on our plate right now. The complexity of our system makes this an interesting problem to solve and one that we all need to engage in. That’s really what I love most about solving big platform-wide problems: you can’t do it alone. The energy of smart people coming together to solve difficult problems is exhilarating.”
The BetterCloud buffet: “BetterCloud has a culture of learning — one of our core values is Hungry Yet Humble. That mindset is entrenched in our engineering team, which seeks continuous improvement and new ways to learn. Our engineers are enthusiastic and engaged, with open minds and a deep desire to grow, no matter how experienced they already are. It’s not often that you find a group where this attitude is so pervasive and deeply embedded in everything we do.”
What they do: Simplifying the cloud-buying, cloud-selling and management journey, Pax8 empowers clients with education, resources and support to reach successful cloud practices.
A growing stack: “The tech stack at Pax8 is constantly evolving and growing. As we add new solutions, we focus on adding the right tools for each project. The agile approach enables us to grow, expand and add emerging technologies as projects evolve.”
“We built the Pax8 platform’s main backend application using Java and Groovy with a Postgres database, and the frontend utilizing Vue.js. When building newer solutions, we use Kotlin as the backend programming language and Vue.js for the frontend, though some of our more recent services operate entirely on Google’s Firebase platform. For solutions requiring a relational database, we generally utilize PostgreSQL. However, others perform better with a NoSQL database — for those, we typically use DynamoDB. In situations not requiring a full-time application, we utilize AWS Lambda to process JavaScript snippets for quick, event-driven, serverless operations.”
If there’s a gap that Pax8 can fill, we dive in and go for it.’’
A global-oriented scale: “We recently launched Pax8 UK, the first step in our global expansion roadmap. In the next few years, we will expand our presence into additional international markets, increasing our impact and reach.”
“To enter these new markets effectively, we must constantly iterate our platform and marketplace. For example, it must be available in different languages, display the correct products for each region, transact in the user’s local currency and adjust to each market’s tax laws and legal agreements. The requirements impact every engineering team, and each faces unique challenges in our goal to continue providing a marketplace for technology professionals to buy cloud products.”
“I enjoy this project because we are building improvements to scale and support future needs. For example, we could ideally add a new country, language and currency to our platform without requiring any development work. Those capabilities would enable Pax8 to scale quickly, and the challenge is more fun and exciting than simply adding more codebase options.”
Rapid-fire problem solvers: “We are incredibly aggressive about solving problems that we see in the market. If there’s a gap that Pax8 can fill, we dive in and go for it. As an engineering team, we try to live up to that standard. We move faster than any team I’ve ever been a part of, with multiple production releases every week and code pushed from a handful of groups working simultaneously on numerous projects. It’s fun and exciting knowing your work could impact partners in a matter of days, rather than working for months or years on a project they may never use.”
“While we are driven by our mission to develop advanced and innovative technology, we also take time to enjoy our team and build strong relationships. Many team members spend time together outside of work. We also have an annual competition-style event called Bug Bash, where the team comes together for several days to see who can remove the most software bugs from our backlog. At our annual Hackathon, we encourage engineers to design their own projects and spend 48 hours building a prototype. Winners are awarded prizes and often granted time in their work schedule to complete the projects and adopt them into the Pax8 tech stack.”
What they do: Between its proprietary advertising software platform — UI.Marketing — and partnerships with local marketers, media agencies and channel sales organizations, Adcellerant is helping clients achieve quality digital marketing.
Their tech stack: “From the software side, our tech stack includes React, Node, BigQuery, Java, Angular, Ruby and more. On the product side, to support our engineering department we use Jira and Zendesk.”
As we grow, we implement new processes that will help support the team.’’
Baking in support for a cookieless future: “The most interesting project that we’re working on now is how to ensure our software can help our partners understand all the recent changes with cookies, and how we can support the new cookieless future. I enjoy creating opportunities for our software to be the first to market on adapting better technology to help our current partners.”
Growing from within: “Our team changes and adapts very quickly to new ideas from within the organization. We are growing fast. It’s great to see that as we grow, we implement new processes that will help support the team.”
What they do: Scaled Agile is the provider of SAFe®, a global framework for enterprise agility. Through learning and certification programs, their community of hundreds of thousands of trained professionals aims to help organizations build leaner systems and improve business outcomes.
Their tech stack: “Our team focuses on Salesforce and WordPress. Our Salesforce team uses several clouds, including Sales and Service, but our developers primarily work in the Experience (also known as Communities) cloud. We also utilize a few third-party tools to fill gaps, such as Pendo for user guidance and onboarding, and Coveo for the search engine on our community. We have a continuous delivery pipeline setup via BitBucket, and we just got Snowflake for our data warehouse.”
The team I’m on now has been the most collaborative team I’ve worked with in my Salesforce development career.’’
Scaling Salesforce with Snowflake: “Scaled Agile recently purchased Snowflake to use as our data warehouse. I am currently working on choosing which integration tool or ETL (extract, transform, load) tool we want to use to push our data from Salesforce to the warehouse. It’s been fun seeing all the different things Snowflake can do.”
Valuing new visions: “The team I’m on now has been the most collaborative team I’ve worked with in my Salesforce development career. It’s really awesome being around others that are always happy to sit down and white-board something out, or even talk through a crazy pet project idea. We definitely have a focus on making one another better by sharing our knowledge, which is so fun and a great way to learn.”
“Every week the Salesforce developers get together for what we call our Dev Guild, which is an hour of dedicated time to talk through problems we are facing, ideas we have, or anything else we want to bring to the other developers. It’s a great space to throw out crazy ideas — we’ve had some really neat things come out of it.”
