What Career Growth Looks Like for Engineers at Northslope

Why Patrycja Zajac Chose to Build Her Engineering Career at Northslope

For Patrycja Zajac, working as an engineer at a large financial institution was largely what she expected it to be: operating in a silo with few client interactions and a rigid structure around career progression. 

It didn’t take her long to realize that she wanted something different. 

“I wanted to work with customers directly, not just ship code into a pipeline,” Zajac said.

Then she discovered Northslope, a startup that builds custom AI applications to help large enterprises transform how they operate on top of Palantir’s platforms and AI labs’ technologies. 

When Zajac interviewed with the team at Northslope last year, she said she could tell that everyone was very intelligent and passionate about their work, and that she would learn a lot if she were to join. So, she made the leap and took a position as a forward deployed engineer, and says she has taken on leadership responsibilities that would take years to attain at other organizations. 

At Northslope, there are no fixed timelines for growth. Team members are expected to figure out what they want to do and simply get started, creating a workplace where evolution isn’t a possibility: It’s an expectation. 

“The standards are clear, but there’s genuine freedom in how you meet them,” Zajac said. “Nobody’s waiting to give you permission, and that changes how you show up.”

Below, Zajac shares more about her career journey, detailing how Northslope has empowered her growth, and sharing her advice for early-career technologists who are eager to level up their careers quickly. 

 

How Northslope’s Interview Process and Project Work Stood Out

Give us a snapshot of your career so far. 

I studied computer science and math, graduated in 2023, and went straight into a full-stack engineering role at JPMorganChase. The work was technically solid, but the environment was what you’d expect from a large bank: boxed into one division, multiple layers between you and any real client interaction, advancement on a fixed timeline regardless of what you were actually doing. I knew pretty quickly that wasn’t a long-term fit for me. What I was looking for was closer contact with real problems and more variety. I wanted to work with customers directly, not just ship code into a pipeline. 

Northslope came up, and the interview process alone was enough to convince me. The technical conversations were genuinely challenging, not in a hazing way, but in a “these people are sharp and they’re taking this seriously” way. I could tell I’d be working with people I’d actually learn from. I joined in October 2025, and within my first weeks, I was an engineering lead on a project that’s since grown from a four-person team to 11. The problems we’re working on are unlike anything I touched at JPMorganChase, in industries I never expected to be close to. It’s been a different pace entirely.

 

How Northslope Approaches Career Progression and Internal Mobility

What formal or informal career pathing frameworks exist for your role/function?

There’s no rigid hierarchy and no “wait your turn” timeline. Coming from JPMorganChase, where advancement was largely year-based and the path was fixed, that took some adjusting to, but in the best way. The framing I’ve heard internally at Northslope is “hats you can put on,” like engineering lead or client-facing lead. The expectation is that you figure out what you want to do and pursue it. The culture actively supports that. What makes it work is that every project is different enough that you’re not just running the same playbook. You can approach the same role differently on different engagements, take it further than you did last time, and test what you’re capable of. The standards are clear, but there’s genuine freedom in how you meet them. Nobody’s waiting to give you permission, and that changes how you show up.

 

What Resources Support Professional Growth at Northslope

Name some resources that accelerated your own growth.

The feedback culture, without question. We do companywide feedback every three months, and on my project, we run feedback cycles every two weeks across all 11 people on the team. That’s a lot of signals, and it compounds. At most companies, feedback is something that happens to you once a year in a formal review. Here, it’s just part of how the work moves. You get used to giving it and receiving it, and you get better at both faster than you’d expect. The second is the weekly all-hands meeting. It would be easy to treat it as a calendar obligation, but it’s genuinely one of the better learning mechanisms I’ve found. You stay close to what other project teams are dealing with, see how they’re solving things, and can bring that back to your own work. I’ve spotted an approach on a different engagement and adapted it for mine more than once. In a company this size, that kind of lateral learning is available if you pay attention.

 

How often do career conversations or promotion reviews occur?

Quarterly, which is more frequent than most places. A lot of companies do it annually, and what that creates is a “promotion period” pattern: People perform differently when reviews are coming. The more regular cadence here means the conversation stays tied to actual work. I don’t feel like I have to manufacture a moment to be seen. I also know I can reach out outside of those scheduled cycles if something’s worth discussing. That matters. It makes recognition feel less transactional and more just part of how the work gets talked about.

 

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How Northslope Develops Leadership and Client-Facing Skills

Describe one skill you’ve gained since joining and how you learned it.

I expected technical growth. What I didn’t expect was how much of my development would be in leadership and client-facing work and how fast that would happen. Leading a team of 11 people within six months of joining changes how you think about almost everything. The specific things I’ve had to learn: giving feedback that actually lands and doesn’t just make people defensive; knowing when to shield team members from noise versus when to bring them in; having difficult conversations with stakeholders without burning the relationship; and pushing back on a client lead when the team needs you to hold the line. Those aren’t skills you pick up from documentation. A lot of it came from colleagues with different career backgrounds than mine, watching how they prepare for meetings, how they build trust through follow through on small things, how they carry themselves in a room when the energy gets tense. I’ve learned more from proximity to that than I could have from anywhere else.

 

“The thing that made me say ‘yes’ was simpler than any of that: I wanted to work with people I genuinely aspired to be like. That’s held up.”

 

Advice for Advancing Quickly at Northslope

What advice would you give a new hire who wants to advance quickly here?

Bring your fresh eyes and actually use them. When you’re new, you see things that people who’ve been inside something for a while stop noticing. When you spot something that could work better, say something, but come with a solution, not just the observation. A fast-growing company has real gaps, and the people who identify them and show up with a concrete proposal build trust and ownership faster than almost anything else. It also signals the kind of mindset that gets you more responsibility and compels you to take the responsibility when it’s offered. It comes earlier here than anywhere else I’ve seen. That can feel like a lot, and it is. You have to be prepared for it. But working with talented people on real problems at this stage of a company’s growth is rare. Don’t wait until you feel completely ready, because that moment doesn’t really come.

 

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your career journey at Northslope?

I came to Northslope specifically for the technical challenge and the client exposure. Both have delivered. What surprised me was the leadership piece. The work is varied, the problems are real, and the customers we work with are trying to do something that actually matters in their industry. That combination is harder to find than most people realize, especially this early in a career. I didn’t expect to be running a team of 11 inside six months, and I definitely didn’t expect how much it would reshape how I think about myself. But the thing that made me say ‘yes’ was simpler than any of that: I wanted to work with people I genuinely aspired to be like. That’s held up.

 

 

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